TY - GEN
T1 - The atacama large aperture submillimetre telescope
T2 - Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy XI 2022
AU - Ramasawmy, Joanna
AU - Klaassen, Pamela D.
AU - Cicone, Claudia
AU - Mroczkowski, Tony K.
AU - Chen, Chian Chou
AU - Cornish, Thomas
AU - Da Cunha, Elisabete
AU - Hatziminaoglou, Evanthia
AU - Johnstone, Doug
AU - Liu, Daizhong
AU - Perrott, Yvette
AU - Schimek, Alice
AU - Stanke, Thomas
AU - Wedemeyer, Sven
N1 - Funding Information:
We are extremely grateful for the guidance from, and the tireless devotion of, Richard Hills throughout the AtLAST optical design. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 951815.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 SPIE.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - 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 stateof-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. The AtLAST design study project is currently supported by a Horizon 2020 grant aimed at studying the governance, telescope design, site selection, telescope operations, sustainable energy supply, and science drivers of the future AtLAST observatory. With quantified and specific science goals, we can begin to place technical specifications on the telescope and its instrumentation. As a first step in this process, we conducted a consultation on potential AtLAST science with the global (sub-)millimeter astrophysics community. The consultation involved nearly 100 scientists based in 22 countries, and the resulting 28 use cases indicate the breadth of transformational science that such a high-throughput facility could make possible: from exploring the prebiotic molecular chemistry of comets in our own Solar System, detecting the extended, diffuse cold gas in the circumgalactic medium of both our own and distant galaxies, to detailed measurements of the thermal, kinetic, and relativistic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect and mapping of large-scale structure. Already these science cases define some core requirements for AtLAST's instrumentation: wide bandwidths, multichroic observations, high spectral resolution, fast mapping and a large field of view. Further refinement of these is planned over the course of the current EU-funded project, resulting in detailed case studies of the telescope and instrumentation requirements needed by the community to deliver a next-generation submillimeter observing facility.
AB - 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 stateof-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. The AtLAST design study project is currently supported by a Horizon 2020 grant aimed at studying the governance, telescope design, site selection, telescope operations, sustainable energy supply, and science drivers of the future AtLAST observatory. With quantified and specific science goals, we can begin to place technical specifications on the telescope and its instrumentation. As a first step in this process, we conducted a consultation on potential AtLAST science with the global (sub-)millimeter astrophysics community. The consultation involved nearly 100 scientists based in 22 countries, and the resulting 28 use cases indicate the breadth of transformational science that such a high-throughput facility could make possible: from exploring the prebiotic molecular chemistry of comets in our own Solar System, detecting the extended, diffuse cold gas in the circumgalactic medium of both our own and distant galaxies, to detailed measurements of the thermal, kinetic, and relativistic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect and mapping of large-scale structure. Already these science cases define some core requirements for AtLAST's instrumentation: wide bandwidths, multichroic observations, high spectral resolution, fast mapping and a large field of view. Further refinement of these is planned over the course of the current EU-funded project, resulting in detailed case studies of the telescope and instrumentation requirements needed by the community to deliver a next-generation submillimeter observing facility.
KW - Single-dish telescope
KW - Submillimeter
KW - Telescope design
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85140744911&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1117/12.2627505
DO - 10.1117/12.2627505
M3 - Conference paper
AN - SCOPUS:85140744911
T3 - Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering
BT - Millimeter, Submillimeter, and Far-Infrared Detectors and Instrumentation for Astronomy XI
A2 - Zmuidzinas, Jonas
A2 - Gao, Jian-Rong
PB - SPIE
Y2 - 17 July 2022 through 22 July 2022
ER -
