Future Observing Facilities

ALMA

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, is an international collaboration to develop a world-class telescope array to study the universe from a site in the foothills of Chile's Andes Mountains. Each of ALMA's antenna dishes will measure 12 meter wide. The ALMA antennas will be movable. At its largest, the array will measure 14 km, and at its smallest, only 150 m. Its receivers will cover the range from 30 to 950 GHz. The ALMA correlator, a specialized computer that combines the information received by the antennas, will perform an astounding 16,000 million-million (1.6x10¹⁶) operations per second.

An additional, compact array of 7m and 12m diameter antennas is also foreseen. Construction of ALMA started in 2003 and will be completed in 2012; it will become incrementally operational from 2010 on.

For more information please read the ALMA page or visit the ALMA Project Web site.

E-ELT

ESO has been working together with its user community of European astronomers and astrophysicists to define the new giant telescope needed by the middle of the next decade. More than one hundred astronomers from all European countries have been involved throughout 2006, helping the ESO Project Offices to produce a novel concept, in which performance, cost, schedule and risk were carefully evaluated.

The present concept features as a baseline a telescope with a 42m diameter mirror, and is revolutionary. The site of the E-ELT is not yet fixed as studies are still underway with a plan to make a decision by 2008.

With a diameter of 42 m and its adaptive optics concept, the E-ELT will be more than one hundred times more sensitive than the present-day largest optical telescopes, such as the 10-m Keck telescopes or the 8.2-m VLT telescopes.

For more information please read the E-ELT page or visit the E-ELT Project Web site.