AtLAST is a concept for a 50-meter single-dish submillimeter telescope with a 1–2 degree field-of-view (FoV) to be built on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile, at over 5 km above sea level. AtLAST will be fully powered by sustainable energy sources, will be the first large (defined as having a diameter >15 m) mm/submm single-dish telescope in the Southern hemisphere, and the first in either hemisphere to access frequencies >350 GHz. It will cover the 30–950GHz frequency range, picking up where SKAO leaves off. While this is roughly the same frequency range as ALMA, AtLAST will provide entirely complementary mapping capabilities, both in terms of speed and angular scales accessible. Interferometers like ALMA and SKAO can have high sensitivity due to their large collecting areas, but they have much poorer wide field mapping speeds than their single dish counterparts. The design of AtLAST is optimised to deliver unprecedented mapping speed, which will be >100,000 times faster than that of ALMA. AtLAST is currently under design consolidation by an international consortium consisting of 20 universities, research institutes and industry partners, led by the University of Oslo and including ICE-CSIC.

The Italian 64-meter radio and millimeter Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT) will serve as a pathfinder for AtLAST. Credits: University of Oslo.