The Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment

摘要

The Atacama. Submillimeter Telescope Experiment (ASTE) is ajoint project between Japan and Chile to install and operate a high-precision,10 m telescope in the Atacama desert for exploration of the southern sky inthe sub-millimeter. Currently, we have achieved a main reflector surface accu- racy of 19 μm (RMS) and a pointing accuracy of1."2(RMS). A new 350 GHzcartridge-type receiver, installed in September 2004, shows good performance,with a typical system noise temperature of 200 K (DSB~1) and a main beam ef-ficiency of up to 0.8 during winter nights. Four banks of 512 MHz (or 128 MHz)width digital spectrometers with 1024 channels are available. Extensive sub-millimeter observations of various objects such as massive star forming regionsin our Galaxy have been started with ASTE.