LLAMA, a new radiotelescope in the Andes

Séminaire IPAG de Jacques Lepine (Université de Sao Paulo), vendredi 6 février 2015 à 11h00, IPAG seminar room

LLAMA is a collaboration between Argentina and Brazil to install a 12m radiotelescope in the Andes, at 4800m altitude, and at 150 km in straight line from ALMA. Thanks to the high altitude and the dry atmosphere of the site, the atmospheric transmission, permits molecular line observations up to ≈ 800 GHz. The telescope will be equipped with several heterodyne, broad-band receivers covering the spectral windows from millimetre to submillimeter wavelength, between 100 and 800 GHz, coupled with Fast Fourier Transform Spectrometers. This will make LLAMA especially well-suited to carry out unbiased, sensitive molecular line surveys and to analyze the rich molecular line spectra from Galactic and extragalactic sources in the submillimeter domain. We will describe the present status of the antenna construction and of the planned receivers.