In this animation, the radio waves received from objects in space reflect off of ALMA antenna dishes and come to a focus at the subreflector. They bounce down into the center of the dish where the Front End of receiver cartridges sits. Turned into an electronic signal that has been mixed down to a lower frequency that computers can handle, the data travel along fiber optics to the supercomputer known as a correlator. The correlator's job is to pair up every telescope with every other telesscope and combine their waves. Then those are merged into a single data package from their observation.

Credit: B. Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF