On October 14, the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) welcomed 28 students from the 3rd to 9th grades of the Santiago Japanese School for their workplace study tour to the JAO’s central office in Vitacura, Santiago, Chile. Although the weather forecast predicted heavy rain on the day, the weather turned out better with blue sky during lunch time and the students could have lunch outside on the grass in the courtyard of the building.
The workplace study tour began with the talk about the ALMA telescope by Professor Tetsuo Hasegawa, Director of the NAOJ Chile Observatory. He started from the explanation of how the Sun is burning and then what we can see with a radio telescope, and extended the topic further into the stars discovered by the latest ALMA observations, and the origin of the planetary systems.
After the talk about ALMA, the students were invited to participate in a teleconference, which is a daily communication tool connecting three locations between Santiago, ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in the United States, and they saw how astronomers are working in an international project. After the teleconference, the video screen was connected to the OSF in the Atacama Deseart at 2900 m. Shin’ichiro Asayama, an associate professor at the NAOJ Chile Observatory, was on site and provided a virtual tour of the facility through the screen. Students asked a variety of questions to astronomers and engineers working on site, such as “why did you become an astronomer?” and “What kind of job are you doing?” etc. At the end of the tour, they visited the office of an astronomer working at the central office and were given the explanation of how to analyze the ALMA observation data.
During the tour, everyone looked very interested. They asked many questions eagerly even during break time and enjoyed communicating with local ALMA staff beyond the language barrier. It was a great pleasure for me as one of the organizers of this tour to see such a joyful look of children. [Text and photo provided by Satoko Takahashi]
