#almasse

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ALMA in action...

A new window into the Universe has opened with the start of Early Science at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Watch the world's most complex ground-based telescope in action and get a first look at its unique views of the Universe.

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Atacama Nightsky

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Stand building...

We put the final bits and pieces together for our stand on Friday... lots of heavy lifting and fun with simulators and Frisbees. 

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5000m in Chile

Sarah Graves

The ALMA telescope is on a plateau at 5000m altitude in Chile -- the same height as the Everest base camp. I  got to go up to visit the site in May.

Before my trip up, I'd already spent a few days at the ALMA operations site at 2900m. Even this is high enough that you really notice the effect of altitude -- carrying my suitcase the short distance into my room the first night there left my heart pumping. However, 5000m is a lot more serious.

The journey starts with a quick trip to the ALMA medical room, to have my heart rate and bloody pressure checked. After I've been passed, its time to make sure I've got sunscreen and sunglasses -- as well as gloves, a wooly hat and a warm jacket. Its pretty cold up on the site on the day I visit, but the high altitude means the sunlight is a lot stronger than it is at ground level, and you want to keep the UV away.

We also make sure we've got blood-oxygen monitors and some cans of compressed air. The oxygen levels at 5000m are low enough that you want to keep an eye on your blood-oxygen level and take regular breaths from the oxygen.

The landscape around the site is amazing, and to someone used to a wet and green Britain the dry Chilean mountains look like an alien landscape. This is a view from a peak overlooking some of the more far-flung ALMA antenna pads -- you can just see the roads out to the most distant pads in the left. Once its completed, ALMA will have its dishes spread out around the plateau, with up to 16km between them.

Even though I didn't have to do anything more physically taxing than walk around for a few minutes, I can feel the effect of the low oxygen as I wander around snapping picture. I have to consciously remind myself to keep taking extra deep breaths, as well as occasional breaths from the cans of oxygen we've brought. But people have had to build all the telescope infrastructure in these conditions -- roads, power lines, antenna pads, buildings, radio masts, weather stations, all had to be constructed or installed at the high site. As well as an amazing scientific instrument, ALMA is also a hugely impressive engineering project, constructed under very difficult conditions.

Below, you can see an overview of the central region of the ALMA site. The individual dishes are spread out over about 2km in this picture. Once the telescopes construction is finsihed, the massive 12m dishes will be moved around the site regularly -- averaging about one dish moving every single day.

We drive back down to the 5000m plateau where the ALMA antennas live to take a close up look at them.  In the picture below you can see the antennas clustered together from a lot closer up. The building off to the right of the image contains the ALMA correlator. The correlator is where the signal from each of the dishes are combined together to create one much more detailed image. The level of detail we can see is determined by the size of the distances between the individual dishes instead of by the size of a single dish.

And here's a close up of some of the 12m dishes. ALMA will eventually have 66 dishes, and as of May this year they already had 33 dishes at the 5000m site! The dishes are a mix of 12m dishes and a few 7m dishes. The 7m ones are placed very close together in the centre of the array, and this helps ensure that ALMA can produce more accurate images. Each of the 12m dishes weighs almost 100 tonnes, and the special transporters that move them to and from the different pads has to have a 28-wheel drive!

After this we head back down to the comfort of the ALMA operations site -- after a few hours spent at 5000m, the lower site feels far more comfortable than it did in the morning!

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"Interferometered" Team

Some of the ALMA SSE team as seen through our interferometry simulator 

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Scientists having fun with the simulator...

We have finished writing the code (in glorious Python) to get our ALMA demonstrator for the Summer Science Exhibition, so here are a few quick previews....

Here is Adam looking at his best through the eyes of an interferometer:

Note the fake colours, what we are using to make the images is the brightness - then for fun we add the really the garish colour scheme. The redder the brighter. I'm guessing this means that Adam was blushing when he had is photo taken by the webcam :-)

Not looking quite as complete as Adam, probably down to the type of interferometer I made (the more antennas the better), is me:

Can you guess what is on my T-shirt?

John decided to go for the Blue Peter approach, getting out a piece of paper and some Tipp-Ex...

During the exhibition you should take note of our twitpic feed as users will be able to upload their creations for all to see! We hope to see many more interesting images than we have produced so far. 

The time is counting down... so see you at the:

The above photo is the exhibition logo as seen through ALMA's 'eyes'.

-- Sam George

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ALMA - a video introduction

An introduction to ALMA by scientists involved in the ALMA observatory exhibition at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2012 :

Dr John Richer, Dr Rosie Bolton and Dr Samuel George talk about ALMA science and life as a radio astronomer (this was filmed at the MRAO, Cambridge):

Dr Adam Avison discussing ALMA science and the life of a scientist whilst out observing:

-- Sam George

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LEGO ALMA!

Yes, you read that correctly, there are fully robotic models of the ALMA transporter and antennas made out of LEGO!

The ALMA LEGO Simulator are scale robots of one of the ALMA antennas and the transporter truck. Both devices are controlled remotely via Bluetooth communication and are designed to provide a coordinated movement of the antennas and the rearrangement of the ALMA antennas by rising and moving an antenna with the transporter truck. The transporter is huge, measuring some 20x10x6 meters with a total weight of 130 tons when empty! The LEGO model consists of 4500 LEGO pieces and 2 2 Intelligent Bricks. The antennas model uses about 5000 LEGO pieces, which will create a dish of about 30 centimetres.

Links:

The LEGO simulator project: http://pyxiss.feriadesoftware.cl/en/

LEGO simulator on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlmaLegoSimulator

-- Sam George