Giant antenna truck set for sky-high task

A colossal 28-wheel truck that will help build a major telescope array in the Chilean Andes has successfully passed a series of tests.

The giant vehicle will heave antennas - each weighing 115 tonnes - up a mountainside to the site of the array, a plateau 5,000m above sea level.

The Alma telescope will study the night sky at sub-millimetre wavelengths.

Astronomers say Alma will illuminate one half of the Universe that has hitherto been shrouded in darkness.

When it is completed in 2012, the £470m ($900m) array will be able to observe some of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang, and catch planets in the act of forming around young stars.

The telescope project will initially comprise 66 high-precision antennas, installed at the high-altitude Llano de Chajnantor site in Chile's Atacama desert.

Each antenna has a dish measuring about 12m across and a surface engineered to be accurate to within 20 microns (millionths of a metre).

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