Telescopes of the world

CLASS

Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor

It is an array of four microwave telescopes at a high-altitude site in Chile's Atacama Desert of Chile. This experiment aims to probe reionization and primordial gravitational radiation by making precise measurements of the polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) on the largest angular scales over 75% of the sky (+30° declination to -76°) at 40, 90, 150, and 220 GHz.

CLASS also studies our solar system and galaxy, as well as better understanding results on neutrinos and dark energy.

ACT

Atacama Cosmology Telescope

It is a six-meter diameter telescope on Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Its goal was to make high-resolution measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropies and detect massive galaxy clusters via the thermal Sunyaev Zel'dovich (tSZ) effect with observations centred at 148 GHz, 218 GHz, and 277 GHz.

SPT

South Pole Telescope

The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10-meter telescope operating at the National Science Foundation's South Pole research station. Designed for conducting large-area millimeter and sub-millimeter wave surveys to map primary and secondary anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, SPT is the largest telescope ever deployed at the South Pole.

The SPT is equipped with the most powerful cosmic microwave background (CMB) camera now operating, the three-band (90, 150, 220 GHz), 16,000-detector, polarization-sensitive SPT-3G camera.

Planck

Planck was a space observatory, studying the relic photons (CMB) from the L2 point. It measured the temperature variations across the cosmic microwave background with much better sensitivity, angular resolution and frequency range than any previous satellite, giving astronomers an unprecedented view of our Universe when it was extremely young, just 300 000 years old.