Thursday, March 14, 2013

Habemus ALMA!


Yesterday was a career-defining day for many people.  No, I'm not referring to the new Pope.  March 13th, 2013 marked the official inauguration of the ALMA observatory, a multi-national scientific collaboration many years in the making.  The inauguration event took place at the ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF), located at an elevation of 3000 meters in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile, where more than 500 people gathered, with the President of Chile, Sebastián Piñera as the guest of honor.  Joining President Piñera were representatives of ALMA’s international partners, foreign ambassadors, ALMA executives, ALMA personnel and representatives of the neighbouring communities.

Important guests at the inauguration, on one of the antenna transporters.
Photo credit: ESO

Although commissioning and science verification, as well as early science projects have been undertaken during the construction phase of ALMA, the inauguration event officially marks the transition to a fully-operating observatory.  While I wasn't one of the lucky few (hundreds of) people invited to the inauguration, I watched the video feed from the ALMA Santiago Central Offices, along with many of the ALMA employees responsible for various components of the observatory.  After about one hour waiting in anticipation for the President to arrive at the OSF and for the ceremony to begin, it was a festive environment in the conference room which typically hosts routine meetings or seminars.

Several speeches during the event reminded us of the complexity and longevity of the ALMA project (check out this video for the full story).  In fact, the observatory had been independently conceived as three separate projects by the Europeans, North Americans and Japanese in the 1980s.  Each cohort was hoping to access the best site in the world for radio astronomy, and investigate the southern skies at wavelengths that had previously been basically invisible to humans.  In the 1990s, the independent groups came together with an agreement to build the largest observatory in the world, something that no individual member could achieve on its own, considering the total construction cost of ALMA is more than a billion US dollars.  Construction began in 2003, and here we are in 2013 celebrating the observatory's inauguration!

You can find a brochure about the ALMA partnership here.

Some people at the inauguration have devoted their careers to this observatory, and they must be very proud, perhaps amazed, at what it has achieved, and what it will achieve during its expected operating lifetime of 30 years.  I should be very thankful to these people, because watching the inauguration, I also began to reflect on the role that ALMA has played in my own "career".  When I entered graduate school at Yale, I was interested in learning about astronomy as much as I was interested in learning about how to do astronomy.

The idea that what we know about star formation is limited by the capabilities of the most powerful telescope fascinated me, and I knew that ALMA would provide ground-breaking data in the coming years.  Equally fascinating to me was the idea that only via an international collaboration on the grandest scale could a sufficient telescope be constructed.  And, lucky for me, this observatory was being built in the Atacama Desert, a landscape which I already loved and to which I hoped to return.

My thesis has been exciting because I'm learning the capabilities of ALMA along with the majority of other astronomers, grad students and professors alike. I have been fortunate to be visiting ALMA during 2012-2013, to learn from the experts how ALMA operates, and to see as the first ALMA results are released.  This year we will have our own science project observed with ALMA, and we're eagerly awaiting answers to questions we have been asking for several years about our designated target.

We represent the ALMA partners: East Asia, Europe, North America and Chile
Photo credit: ESO/Max Alexander

I estimate that if my astronomy career dates back to 2008 with my first astronomy research project at Cerro Tololo, then ALMA-anticipation has occupied about 50-75% of my career.  It's not that I myself have been integral in the construction of ALMA, but rather that ALMA has been integral in the development of my own career.  I wonder if one day I will witness the inauguration of another major astronomical project like ALMA, but from the perspective of one of those who made it happen.

Not only the scientific results, but the economic and cultural components of astronomy keep me interested, and keep me traveling to observatories around the world, the majority in Chile.  We have a lot to learn about the Universe, and a lot to learn about people working together to make these discoveries possible.

No comments:

Post a Comment