The Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) will be loaded onto a transatlantic shipping vessel in Antwerp, Belgium, at the end of January for a month-long voyage by sea to its home: Chile, just below the summit of Cerro Chajnantor where, at 18,400 feet, it will be the second-highest telescope in the world.
”This is a huge milestone for the project and we wish FYST bon voyage,” said Gordon Stacey, the project’s director and professor of astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences. “The next steps are transport up the mountain and reconstructing the telescope at the high site, then installing the primary and secondary mirrors. After system verification, the ‘keys’ will be turned over to the instrument team for first light early in 2026.”
“This is a signal step toward the realization of a vision of a world-class telescope to exploit a unique site in Chile for submillimeter astronomy. That vision was promulgated by the late Prof. Riccardo Giovanelli who recruited my financial help some two decades ago,” said Fred Young ’64, M.Eng. ’66, MBA ’66, who has been involved with and supported FYST since the project began.
Because of the high altitude and remoteness of the desert location in Chile’s Parque Astronómico Atacama, building the telescope on-site would have been impossible. Yet those conditions are necessary to achieve the low humidity and clear skies required for submillimeter observations.
The telescope, which will be the most powerful in the world for its mapping speed and sensitivity at its wavelength, was designed by CPI Vertex Antennentechnik in Duisburg, Germany, and then exactingly assembled in Xanten on the Wessel GmbH premises. The process of assembly and testing took more than two years, and all key performance metrics have been met or exceeded.
Recently, FYST – which is about the size of a five-story building – was painstakingly disassembled and its largest parts sent on heavy-duty vehicles to the port of Wesel, where they were loaded by crane onto the Helena Adriaan, a Dutch-flagged Rhine barge bound for Antwerp. There, FYST will be transferred to the MV Sloman Discoverer, flagged Antigua Barbuda, and is scheduled to arrive in Chile at the Port of Angamos in early March. From there it will be transported overland to its final destination on Cerro Chajnantor.
The telescope’s major sections, most weighing 35 to 55 tons each, were packed with great care to survive the journey.
“The engineering it took to make such a precise design as FYST modular and robust enough to transport halfway around the world is an accomplishment to be proud of,” said Jim Blair, FYST project manager (A&S). “Add to that the logistics needed in terms of exceptionally qualified crane operators and riggers at all transfer points, certified transport vehicles, skilled drivers, skilled workers to remove and restore utilities that block the travel route, bridge and travel studies, permits, export control processes, cargo balance calculations and more. It’s an incredible feat.”
FYST’s novel optical design will deliver high-throughput images with a wide field of view, enabling rapid and efficient mapping of the sky. The images it provides at submillimeter to millimeter wavelengths will offer insights into the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang, as well as into the formation of stars and galaxies and the origin of dark energy.
The telescope’s primary instruments will travel separately to Chile. The CCAT Heterodyne Array Instrument (CHAI) is in development at the University of Cologne, while Mod-Cam and Prime-Cam are undergoing testing at Cornell..
“Our laboratory work on the instruments is progressing well, and we are preparing to ship Mod-Cam to Chile later this year. We look forward to using Mod-Cam for first-light measurements and early science observations in 2026,” said Michael Niemack, CCAT-prime instrument scientist and professor of physics and astronomy (A&S).
The international CCAT consortium developing the telescope, led by Cornell, includes the German consortium of the University of Cologne, the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics; and the Canadian Atacama Telescope Consortium, a partnership of Canadian academic institutions led by the University of Waterloo.
Linda B. Glaser is news and media relations manager for the College of Arts and Sciences.
