On 22 November, the Large Millimeter Telescope was inaugurated by Mexico’s outgoing president Vicente Fox.
Located 250 km east of Mexico City, at 4600 m atop Volcán Sierra Negra, the 50-m LMT is the world’s largest single-dish millimeter-wave telescope. At this stage, the LMT can point and track, but to become fully functional, the reflector surface needs to be finished, the surface panels need to be aligned, and other subsystems need to be commissioned. “It will be a couple of years of fooling around before it’s ready for scientific work,” says Peter Schloerb of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Mexico’s partner in the project. The aim is to start up in 2008, but the timing depends on raising roughly $30 million to finish construction. So far, the telescope has cost about $120 million, of which some $40 million for hardware came from the US.
The LMT’s wavelength range is...
