ITHACA, N.Y. – After a six-week ocean voyage, a week spent waiting to offload, and another week trekking through the mountains, the first major component of the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) has arrived at its final home in Chile.
The disassembled telescope trucked nearly 300 miles to the base of Cerro Chajnantor, in Chile’s Parque Astronómico Atacama. From there, the parts are making a careful ascent 18,400 feet to the summit, where the telescope will be reassembled to eventually begin its work studying the universe, with first light projected for April 2026.
FYST will be the most powerful telescope in the world for its mapping speed and sensitivity at its wavelength. It will detail star and galaxy formation from the earliest days of “cosmic dawn,” through “cosmic noon,” when most of today’s stars were formed, providing insight on cosmic inflation and gravitational waves from the very first moments of the Big Bang. It will also track the flows of gas, dust and magnetic fields across the interstellar ecosystem within galaxies.
“Physicists have known how to measure in the submillimeter frequency ranges that the FYST is targeting for a long time, but before now nobody’s been able to build a telescope to do it – at least not at an affordable price,” project manager Jim Blair said. “The mirrors, and the carbon fiber structures that support them, along with the telescope instruments – CHAI and PrimeCam – are absolutely state of the art. They’re the ‘secret sauce’ that make FYST such a cutting-edge observatory.”
Reassembling the telescope at 18,400 feet will not be an easy task. Workers have to be trained to work at that altitude, and they can work a maximum of 12 or 13 days at a time. For each day they work at extreme altitude, they must spend a day below 9,000 feet. Casual visitors must use supplemental oxygen.
FYST is a project of CCAT Observatory, Inc., a Cornell University-led collaboration that includes a German consortium consisting of the University of Cologne, the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, and a Canadian consortium of universities led by the University of Waterloo.
For additional information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.
Media note: Pictures and drone video can be viewed and downloaded here.
-30-