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The project is funded in North America by the National Science Foundation ( United States) in cooperation with the National Research Council ( Canada); and in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Spain.

1 General information

ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc . (AUI), and on behalf of Europe by ESO.

The project includes:

• No less than 64 x 12 meter antennas located at an elevation of 5,000 m in Llano de Chajnantor, Chile .
• Imaging instrument in all atmospheric window s between 10 mm and 350 micrometreA micrometre ( American spelling: micrometer , symbol m is an SI unit of length. It is defined as one millionth of a metre (1×10−6 m), equivalent to one thousandth of a millimetre. The symbol µ ( Unicode character U+00B5; HTML µ) is the " micrs
• Array configurations from approximately 150 meters to 10 km
• Spatial resolution of 10 milli arcsecondA second of arc or arcsecond is a unit of angular measurement which comprises one-sixtieth of an arcminute, or 1/3600 of a degree of arc or 1/1296000 ≈ 7. 7E-7 of a circle. It is the angular diameter on object of 1 unit diameter at a distance of 360s, 10 times better than the Very Large ArrayThe Very Large Array VLA is a radio astronomy observatory located on the Plains of San Agustin, between the towns of Magdalena and Datil, some fifty miles (80 km) west of Socorro, New Mexico, USA. The VLA stands at 34°04'43" North, 107°37'04" West, at an (VLA) and the Hubble Space TelescopeHubble Space Telescope Space Shuttle Discovery during the second servicing mission of the telescope, STS-82 Organization NASA, ESA Wavelength regimeoptical Orbit height600 km Orbit period100 min Launch date 24 April 1990 Deorbit datecirca 2010 Mass11,000
• The ability to image sources arcminutes to degrees across at one arcsecond resolution
• Velocity resolution under 50 m/s
• Faster and more flexible imaging instrument than the VLA
• Largest and most sensitive instrument in the world at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths
• Point source detection sensitivity 20 times better than the VLA

2 Related topics

• List of observatoriesThe following is a list of astronomical observatories, along with initial dates of operation and location, if available. A Anglo-Australian Observatory 1973 Coonabarabran, Australia Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (Amanda) 2002 Antarctic Apache

3 External links

• NRAO ALMA - official site.