US Community Access to the Large Millimeter Telescope

The Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) is a 50m-diameter single dish millimeter-wave radio telescope. It is located atop a 15,000-foot peak in the Mexican state of Puebla and equipped with a set of state-of-the-art instruments for observations between 1 and 4 millimeters wavelength. The LMT was built in a collaboration between the country of Mexico, led by the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica, y Electrónica, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The National Science Foundation Mid-Scale Innovations Program is now supporting access to the LMT for any astronomer located at a US institution. A total of 15% of the scientific observation time on the LMT will be assigned to members of the US community on the basis of a competitive proposal review and with no requirements for collaboration with members of the current LMT collaboration. Observations will be conducted by trained telescope operators following a queue scheduled, service observing model. Observers will be provided with the scientific support required to plan, propose, carry out, reduce, and analyze their observations.

Colleagues who are interested in using the LMT are invited to join a series of community webinars beginning on 16 October. For more information about the webinars, please contact [email protected]. For descriptions of the LMT and its instrumentation, please visit the LMT web page.

The first proposal opportunity, for the time period of March 2021-September 2021, will be announced this fall.