Japan undertakes the development and manufacture of 16 (four 12-m and twelve 7-m) antennas out of a total of 66 ALMA antennas. The Japanese antennas are assembled, adjusted, and tested at the Operations Support Facility (OSF) at 2900 m above sea level in Chile. After passing rigorous performance tests, antennas are delivered to the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) and used for observations.

Japan handed over the first 12-m antenna to JAO as the first ALMA antenna in December 2008 , which was followed by the remaining three 12-m antennas. In May 2011, Japan handed over the first 7-m antenna and competed the delivery of all the 16 Japanese antennas to JAO on August 23, 2012. These antennas have all been accepted and are now ready for operation.

On October 1, NAOJ ALMA held a ceremony to commemorate the acceptance of 16 antennas at the NAOJ Mitaka campus. Masahiko Hayashi (Director General of NAOJ) offered his congratulations to the antenna team members and other project staff for the successful antenna acceptance, expressing his appreciation for their longtime effort. Following his speech, Tetsuo Hasegawa (NAOJ Chile Observatory Director) and Junji Inatani (Professor at NAOJ, Antenna team leader) talked about the difficulties of the antenna development started from scratch and a hard time they had during the antenna manufacturing phase to meet the challenge of strict specifications which seemed to be impossible under the conventional technology.

Now all the Japanese antennas have been delivered, but this is not the end of our mission. Our final goal is to achieve valuable scientific results and provide new insights of the universe. For this purpose, continuous maintenance activities are also required to keep the highest level of observation capability of ALMA. The ceremony offered a good opportunity for the NAOJ ALMA staff to reaffirm their commitment to the success of the project. At the end of the ceremony, each staff member painted pupils of 16 Daruma dolls resembling 16 antennas to commemorate their successful acceptance. The ceremony was shared with the NAOJ ALMA staff working in Chile via teleconference system.

The top picture shows Professor Junji Inatani painting a pupil of a Daruma doll and the bottom picture shows NAOJ ALMA staff members at the ceremony.