Two Japanese antennas for ALMA

A 12-metre and a 7-metre Japanese antenna under an unusually cloudy sky, in the MELCO assembly area, at the ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF), located at 2900 m altitude on the road up to the Chajnantor plateau. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array is the largest astronomical project in existence, initially composed of 54 12-metre antennas plus a compact array of twelve 7-metre antennas. ALMA, currently under construction at an elevation of 5000 metres, on the Chajnantor plateau, some 50 km from San Pedro de Atacama, in the II Region of Chile, is a truly global partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile.