Astronomy: Answers from the Atacama

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) project is described. This multi-institution collaboration aims to produce arcminute-resolution and micro-Kelvin sensitivity maps of the microwave background temperature over 200 square degrees of the sky in three frequency bands. We give a brief overview of the scientific motivations for such a map, followed by a design outline of our six-meter custom tele...

Gleaning answers from the web∗

A wide variety of valuable textual information resides on the Web, but very little is in a machineunderstandable form such as XML. Instead, the content is usually embedded in HTML markup or other encodings designed for human consumption. The information extraction task is to automatically populate a database with content gleaned from information sources such as Web pages. Wrappers are an import...

Astronomy from Antarctica

Astronomers have always sought the very best locations for their telescopes. From observatories in city centres, astronomers moved first to nearby mountain tops, then to remote sites in distant countries, to aircraft, and into space. In the past decade we have come to realise that the best astronomical observing conditions on the surface of the earth are to be found on the Antarctic plateau. Th...

The Atacama Compact Array System

The Atacama Desert Trek: Outcomes

In June and July 1997, Nomad, a planetary-relevant mobile robot, traversed more than 220 kilometers across the barren Atacama Desert in Chile, exploring a landscape analogous to the surfaces of the Moon and Mars. In this unprecedented demonstration, Nomad operated both autonomously and under the control of operators thousands of kilometers away, addressing issues of robot configuration, communi...