Photo – Page 48 – National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Dish Assembly at ALMA

Inside the Vertex Assembly Building in northern Chile, a General Dynamics engineer readies this North American ALMA dish for attachment to its base.

ALMA Prototype Antennas

At the Very Large Array site in New Mexico, the international partners in ALMA assembled and tested their 12-meter prototype antennas. From left to right: Japanese, North American, and European.

The European and North American prototype ALMA 12-meter telescopes sitting outside the Control Building of the Very Large Array (VLA) where they were tested. The Japanese prototype is not present at the time of this photo, as it had been accepted into the array as the first telescope of ALMA.

Dismantling the Prototype ALMA Antenna

In 2012, the North American prototype ALMA antenna was dismantled at the Very Large Array testing site. It was packaged and shipped to Greenland where it will be renamed the Greenland Telescope. This antenna will be part of a very long baseline interferometry project run by the United States and Taiwan.

VLA Antenna Dwarfs ALMA Antennas

Each antenna of the Very Large Array is 25 meters across. The prototype 12-meter antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array lived at the VLA for testing, giving this rare side-by-side look at their difference in size.

Prototype North American ALMA Antenna

The North American ALMA prototype antenna was successfully tested at the Very Large Array (VLA) site in New Mexico. It was declared a success, and Vertex RSI under General Dynamics used it as a model for all North American ALMA 12-meter telescopes. This prototype was put up for adoption, and the proud new owners are the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in partnership with Academia Sinica in Taiwan. They have installed it in Greenland, and its new name is the Greenland Telescope.

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