In a control room atop a 16,500-foot mountain in Chile’s Atacama desert, Shep Doeleman and his international team of scientists are pulling the “heart” out of a $1.4 billion telescope. They are removing the atomic clock that the telescope relies on to read signals from space, and replacing it with a better one, one that won’t lose a second for the next hundred million years.
“Basically what we’ve done is perform a heart transplant for ALMA,” said Doeleman, an astronomer at MIT and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
It’s a delicate operation. Scientists wear oxygen tanks so they don’t pass out from the altitude. Special housing protects the atomic clock from Chile’s violent earthquakes. Doeleman and his team won’t open the casing to show us the clock, especially while they’re running tests. It is too sensitive, and they don’t want to risk jarring it.
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