Parque Astronómico de Atacama: An ideal site for millimeter, submillimeter, and mid-infrared astronomy

Abstract

The area of Chajnantor, at more than 5000 meters altitude in northern Chile, offers unique atmospheric and operational conditions which arguably make it the best site in the world for millimeter, submillimeter, and mid-infrared observatories. Long-term monitoring of the precipitable water vapor (PWV) column on the Chajnantor plateau has shown its extreme dryness with annual median values of 1.1 mm. Simultaneous measurements of PWV on the Chajnantor plateau (5050 m) and on Cerro Chajnantor (5612 m) show that the latter is around 36% lower under normal atmospheric conditions and up to 80% lower than the plateau in the presence of temperature inversion layers. Recently, the Government of Chile has consolidated the creation of the Parque Astronómico de Atacama (Atacama Astronomical Park), an initiative of the Chilean Commission for Science and Technology (CONICYT). This new Parque offers an opportunity for national and international projects to settle within its boundaries, gain access to an extremely dry site that is suitable for observations over a broad spectral range, especially in the millimeter to mid-infrared wavelengths, and benefit from operational and logistical support within a secure legal framework.

9 pages, 7 figures. Published in PASP

Cited by in corpus (13)

• The CosmoVerse White Paper: Addressing observational tensions in cosmology with systematics and fundamental physics
• The Atacama Large Aperture Submillimetre Telescope (AtLAST)
• Four-year Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) Observations: On-sky Receiver Performance at 40, 90, 150, and 220 GHz Frequency Bands
• Precipitable Water Vapor, Temperature, and Wind Statistics At Sites Suitable for mm and Submm Wavelength Astronomy in Northern Chile
• Twenty years of PWV measurements in the Chajnantor Area
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Modeling Bulk Atmospheric Motion
• Calibration of Transition-edge Sensor (TES) Bolometer Arrays with Application to CLASS
• CMB-HD: Astro2020 RFI Response
• Analysis of the distribution of precipitable water vapor in the Chajnantor area
• Precipitable water vapour measurement using GNSS data in the Atacama Desert for millimetre and submillimetre astronomical observations
• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Quantifying Atmospheric Emission above Cerro Toco
• Deep-learning-based prediction of Precipitable Water Vapor in the Chajnantor area
• Thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich measurements and cosmic infrared background leakage mitigation combining upcoming ground-based telescopes