Speaker
Description
The Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) aims to be a sustainable, upgradeable, multipurpose facility that will deliver orders of magnitude increases in sensitivity and mapping speeds over current and planned sub-mm telescopes. With its 50m dish and 2 degree field of view, the strength of AtLAST is in science where a large field of view, highly multiplexed instrumentation and sensitivity to faint large-scale structure is important, from the gas and dust that fills and surrounds galaxies to the chromosphere of our own Sun. To deliver this science, AtLAST will build on the experience acquired from operating other facilities whilst introducing innovative practices to ensure sustainable operations and a work environment that fosters diversity, equity and inclusion. Operations will be science driven, with a flexible scheduling system and variety of observing modes to accommodate the wide variety of science cases. AtLAST is expected to have a tremendous legacy value given the different imaging and spectroscopic surveys the observatory will conduct along with PI driven science. With the goal of making all this data available to the community, AtLAST will require dedicated infrastructure including a data archive with long-term curation and accessibility and interoperability with other sub-systems. Multiple operations centres will be set up around the world to bring operations closer to researchers and the public. A tailored user support model will be implemented including early (and continuous) training. All of this is being planned with the aim of 30+ years of operations.
