International Consortium Is Created to Build World's Largest Submillimeter Telescope

Caltech News Release
For Immediate Release
July 25, 2007

International Consortium Is Created to Build World's Largest
Submillimeter Telescope

PASADENA, Calif.--Five institutions from North America and Europe
have created a consortium to oversee the building of a 25-meter
submillimeter telescope on a high elevation in Chile. When completed
in 2013, the $100 million instrument will be the premier telescope of
its kind in the world.

The project is formally known as the Cornell Caltech Atacama
Telescope (CCAT), and has been in the works since a $2 million
feasibility/concept design study was begun in 2004 by the California
Institute of Technology and Cornell University. Now that the study
has been completed, the partners are moving to the next phase of the
process.

The consortium members are the California Institute of Technology and
its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Cornell University, the
University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of British
Columbia, and the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre, which
is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

According to deputy project manager Simon Radford, who is based on
the Caltech campus, the telescope will employ recent advances in
technology that will provide unprecedented views of astronomical
phenomena that cannot be studied at other wavelengths.

Because submillimeter-wavelength astronomy is especially effective
for imaging phenomena that do not emit much visible light, the
Atacama telescope will allow observations of stars and planets
forming from swirling disks of gas and dust, will make measurements
to determine the composition of the molecular clouds from which the
stars are born, and could even discover large numbers of galaxies
undergoing huge bursts of star formation in the very distant universe.

Also, the 25-meter telescope could be used to study the origin of
large-scale structure in the universe.

The Atacama telescope will be located at an 18,400-foot altitude atop
Cerro Chajnantor in Chile's Atacama Desert. The high altitude and dry
conditions are important for submillimeter research, which is
hampered by moisture in the air.

Of the projected $100 million cost, $20 million will go to
state-of-the-art instrumentation. In particular, large submillimeter
cameras will complement the huge size of the dish, which, at 25
meters, will have more than twice the area of the largest
submillimeter telescope currently in existence.

The new cameras are made possible by recent developments in sensitive
superconducting detectors, an area in which Caltech physics professor
Jonas Zmuidzinas and his colleagues have been making important
contributions. The new wide-field cameras will produce very sensitive
panoramic images of the submillimeter sky.

Scientists from Caltech and JPL who will be involved in the project
include Andrew Blain, Geoff Blake, Paul Goldsmith, Sunil Golwala,
Andrew Lange, Tom Phillips, Anthony Readhead, Anneila Sargent, Eugene
Serabyn, Tom Soifer, and Michael Werner, among others. The director
of CCAT is Riccardo Giovanelli of Cornell, and the project manager is
Thomas Sebring, also based at Cornell.

The 25-meter telescope is a natural progression in Caltech and JPL's
long-standing interest in submillimeter and infrared astronomy, which
started in the 1960s with the first infrared sky survey, carried out
by professors Robert Leighton and Gerry Neugebauer on Mount Wilson.

In 1983, under Neugebauer's leadership, JPL launched the Infrared
Astronomical Satellite, or IRAS, which discovered huge numbers of
infrared-bright objects. This success paved the way to JPL's current
infrared mission, the Spitzer Space Telescope. Meanwhile, Leighton
went on to design a 10.4-meter submillimeter telescope, which by 1987
led to the construction and operation of the Caltech Submillimeter
Observatory (CSO) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The CSO is funded by the
National Science Foundation, and Tom Phillips, a professor of physics
at Caltech, serves as director.

The CSO is fitted with sensitive submillimeter detectors and cameras,
making it ideal for seeking out and observing the diffuse gases and
their constituent molecules, crucial to understanding star formation.
This experience served as the foundation for JPL's participation in
the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory.

The advantages of the new telescope, in addition to technological
advances in instrumentation and the dry sky of the Atacama region,
will also include a larger and more accurate mirror. The 25-meter
telescope should provide six to 12 times the light-gathering ability
of the CSO, depending on the exact wavelength. Also, the larger
diameter and better surface will result in much sharper images of the
sky.

The CCAT is designed to emphasize wide-field surveys of the
submillimeter sky that will guide follow-up observations with
telescope arrays such as the Combined Array for Research in
Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA), which Caltech played a leading
role in developing, and the international Atacama Large Millimeter
Array (ALMA), also located in northern Chile.

"CCAT will be a particularly important complement to ALMA," said
Caltech astronomy professor Anneila Sargent, director of CARMA and
chair of the interim CCAT board. "CCAT will enable consortium
scientists to make optimal use of ALMA's submillimeter capabilities
to address fundamental questions about star and galaxy formation."

A great opportunity therefore exists for submillimeter astronomy. In
fact, an independent blue-ribbon panel chaired by Robert W. Wilson,
1978 Nobel Laureate who earned his doctorate in physics at Caltech,
recently reported that the Atacama project "will revolutionize
astronomy in the submillimeter/far infrared band and enable
significant progress in unraveling the cosmic origin of stars,
planets, and galaxies.

"CCAT is very timely and cannot wait," the panel said.

"It is a very exciting time for submillimeter astronomy," Zmuidzinas
said when the 2004 feasibility study began. "We are making rapid
progress on all fronts-in detectors, instruments, and new
facilities-and this is leading to important scientific discoveries."

For more information, go to http://www.submm.org.

Contact: Robert Tindol
(626) 395-3631
tindol@xxxxxxxxxxx

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