Major Astronomy Projects

LSST is a great astronomy project. The U.S. giant, Internet Google, which has already caused huge sensation with its three-dimensional maps, now has added a project to digitally film the entire area visible from the Earth through a telescope installed in Chile, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)

The project, which brings together 19 universities and laboratories, plans to build a telescope on Cerro Pachon, in the Forth Region, which (its implementation is scheduled for 2013) will be able to view, weekly, the entire space visible from the Earth using a digital camera of 3000 million pixels.

Alma Observatory (The Atacama Large Millimeter Array) is an international astronomical facility where the objective is to develop a telescope, nothing like it in the world, consisting of a group of up to 66 radiotelescopic antennas working together, all pointing to the same source to study the universe, from a place 5 thousand meters above sea level, in the hghlands (Llano de Chajnantor) of the Andes Mountain Range, 50 kms. from San Pedro de Atacama in the Second Region of Chile. ALMA is the first truly global astronomical project, a site where scientists from around the world will come to use more sophisticated instruments to capture millimetric wavelength light.

The Cerro Armazones, 3,060 meters in height, situated in the Atacama desert some 130 km south of Antofagasta, Chile, was the site chosen to install the telescope largest in the world -known as European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which also aspired Spain, as reported by the Council of European Southern Observatory (IT). "This is an important milestone that allows us to finalize the design basis of this ambitious project, which will allow significant progress in the astronomical knowledge," said Tim de Zeeuw, Director General of that. "I thank the team that selected the place by the enormous work done in recent years".

The next step that is to build the telescope european optical-infrared extremely large (E-ELT), with a primary mirror of 42 meters in diameter. The E-ELT will be "the eye largest in the world in the sky", the only telescope of its kind in the world. That is designing detailed plans for the construction with the cooperation of the community.