The ALMA Telescope will be featured in an NHK news program “Today’s Close-up” (“Close-up Gendai” in Japanese) today. The program focuses on the history of research on planetary formation by Japanese astronomers over 30 years from radio telescopes at Nobeyama and Subaru Telescope in Hawaii through the ALMA Telescope in Chile. With its unprecedented high sensitivity and resolution, the ALMA telescope aims not only to reveal how planets are formed but also to find out interstellar matters leading to the origin of life. The program introduces new astronomical insight to be unveiled by this ultimate radio telescope with comments from researchers engaged in the project.

NHK Today’s Close-up (Japanese)
Air date: October 19 (Wednesday) 7:30 PM-7:56 PM

The picture shows Masato Ishiguro, a professor emeritus at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), explaining the ALMA Telescope in front of the antennas at the Array Operations Site at 5000 m asl. [Photographed by Masaaki Hiramatsu (NAOJ)]