Science and Exploration

The Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: Key Science Drivers

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
astro-ph.IM
July 18, 2022
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The Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: Key Science Drivers
Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope
astro-ph.IM

The Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) is a concept for a 50m class single-dish telescope that will provide high sensitivity, fast mapping of the (sub-)millimeter sky.

Expected to be powered by renewable energy sources, and to be constructed in the Atacama desert in the 2030s, AtLAST’s suite of up to six state-of-the-art instruments will take advantage of its large field of view and high throughput to deliver efficient continuum and spectroscopic observations of the faint, large-scale emission that eludes current facilities. Here we present the key science drivers for the telescope characteristics, and discuss constraints that the transformational science goals place on future instrumentation.

Joanna Ramasawmy, Pamela D. Klaassen, Claudia Cicone, Tony K. Mroczkowski, Chian-Chou Chen, Thomas Cornish, Elisabete Lima da Cunha, Evanthia Hatziminaoglou, Doug Johnstone, Daizhong Liu, Yvette Perrott, Alice Schimek, Thomas Stanke, Sven Wedemeyer

Comments: 19 pages, 4 figures, to be submitted to SPIE Astronomical telescopes & Instruments 2022, Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy XI (conference 12190 abstract 9)
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2207.03914 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2207.03914v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2207.03914
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Submission history
From: Joanna Ramasawmy
[v1] Fri, 8 Jul 2022 14:07:22 UTC (343 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03914 – Full paper

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