Atacama Diary for March 2, 2013--ALMA Explained

Posted By Mat Kaplan

2013/03/02 07:00 CST

Topics: podcasts and videos, interview, Planetary Society People, extrasolar planets, stars and galaxies, radio telescopes, astronomy

Listen to the audio blog entry that includes my complete conversation with Alison Peck and Al Wooten of the NRAO and the ALMA Observatory.

Atacama Diary for March 2^nd, 2013. I had started to write a description of the ALMA Observatory for this second installment of the Diary. ALMA, that’s the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the radio telescope I’ll be visiting in a few days. Then I realized how dumb it would be for me to introduce this amazing tool for discovery when I could let a couple of ALMA experts do the job. Al Wootten has been working on this project for 30 years. He is the North American Project Scientist and head of the North American ALMA Science Center at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Alison Peck has just returned from five years of shuttling between Santiago and the telescope site, where she led a team of ALMA commissioning scientists. What you’re about to hear is the mostly unedited version of my January conversation with Alison and Al at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society. You can hear a shorter version of the interview as part of the January 21^st edition of Planetary Radio, available at planetary.org/radio.