On June 17 and 18, the ASTE/ALMA Development Workshop 2014 was held at the NAOJ Mitaka Campus. A total of 62 researchers from 6 nations/regions attended the workshop to discuss the future plans for the ASTE and ALMA telescopes.

ASTE (Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment) is a submillimeter telescope of 10 meter diameter, which was constructed by NAOJ at an altitude of 4860 meters next to the ALMA site. The ASTE telescope started its observation from 2003 as the first full-fledged submillimeter telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, and has implemented various experiments/developments and demonstrated significant results as a precursor telescope to ALMA. In this workshop, participants discussed mainly the future enhancements of ASTE and future development program of ALMA which has just started its full operations.

In the presentations given by the participants, a variety of new development plans were proposed such a terahertz receiver that enables observations at a frequency higher than the Band 10 receiver covering the highest frequency band of ALMA, a radio camera and multi-beam receiver to achieve wider-field observation, 3-dimensional spectrometer aiming to effectively determine the distance to a distant galaxy (redshift), and a software correlator that allows high-accuracy observation. These developments also served as basic development to realize wider-field of view of ALMA. Furthermore, researchers involved in the study of star formation, the Milky Way Galaxy, Magellanic Cloud, and the distant universe suggested new ideas of observation instruments to promote the research of these areas.

Since the ASTE telescope has an aspect of “experiment” as its official name suggests, it can be used for on-site experiments of newly developed equipment for the improvement of ALMA. Based on the discussions at this workshop, the development of new observation instruments will be brought forward into a concrete shape.