The Earth’s most powerful telescope goes online next week
On March 13, 2013, the ALMA Telescope in northern Chile will officially go online. ALMA stands for Atacama Large Millimeter/Sub Millimeter Array. And the telescope is very powerful - the most powerful yet constructed - perched in Chile’s high desert at an altitude of 16,500 feet, or 5,000 meters.
EarthSky’s team is covering the inauguration on-site. We’ll bring you photos and news of the event from Chile when it happens.ALMA will explore places beyond imagination - the distant birthplaces of planets, stars, and galaxies centuries old - to help us understand our place in the cosmos. Astronomers call this new telescope ALMA, which is the Spanish word for soul.