ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, situated high in the Chilean desert, is the largest ground-based telescope on Earth. This is an insiders' account of how this complex mega-project came to fruition from authors with intimate knowledge of its past and present. The separate roots of ALMA in the United States, Europe, and Japan are traced to their merger into an international partnership involving more than 20 countries. The book relates the search for a suitable telescope site, challenges encountered in organization, funding, and construction, and lessons learned along the way. It closes with a review of the most significant results from ALMA, now one of the most productive telescopes in the world. Written for a broad spectrum of readers, including astronomers, engineers, project managers, science historians, government officials, and the general public, the eBook edition is available to download as an Open Access publication on Cambridge Core.

The volume consists of up-to-date reviews and a selection of contributed papers on subjects including the structure and physical properties of molecular clouds, their role in the star formation process, their dust and chemical properties, molecular cloud surveys of the Milky Way, cloud evolution, problems in cloud mass determinations (a panel discussion and review), the CO properties of external galaxies, nuclei of galaxies as revealed by molecular observations, and galactic spiral structure as reflected by molecular cloud distributions. The abstracts of poster papers on these topics presented at the conference are also included. This book is both a valuable reference and a compendium of current knowledge in this field. It should be of special interest to all students and researchers who work on the physics of star formation, the interstellar medium, molecular clouds and galactic structure.