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To date, one of the largest and most ambitious projects in ground based radio astronomy for the next millennium is ALMA, the "Atacama Large Millimeter Array", a mm and sub-mm wave interferometer consisting of 64 antennas to be built in the Atacama desert in Northern Chile. This project, a collaboration between Europe and the US, presents major technical challenges for the design and construction of various components. An important part of this future observatory will be receivers in the millimeter and sub-mm wave regime. The instrument will be equipped with 10 frequency bands, ranging from 30 GHz to about 950 GHz. In total, about 1200 receivers will be needed for the final array (to be completed around 2009).These requirements call for new and improved designs of mm/sub-mm wave SIS heterodyne mixers. The Netherlands will play an important role in the development of high frequency mixers using superconducting mixer elements through dedicated funds from NOVA, the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy. The mixer development work will be carried out at SRON in Groningen which has extensive experience in these highly specialized parts of scientific instrumentation. SRON also plays a leading role in a technically similar project, the ESA sub-mm satellite observatory HERSCHEL. |
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