ALMA Observatory Gets Targeted By Cyberattack, Shuts Down Operations

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) Observatory located in Chile, has been targeted by a cyber attack on Saturday, October 29th. This has led to the organization taking its public website offline and suspending all astronomical observation operations, as mentioned in Bleeping Computer.

The observatory took to Twitter and announced what happened. The tweet stated that They were attacked at 6:14 AM. They added that given the nature of the episode, there is still no estimate as to when regular activities would resume. Email services at the observatory are limited as of now, but IT specialists are already working on restoring the affected systems.

The organization stated that the attack did not affect any scientific data or the ALMA antennas, which means that no signs of unauthorized data access or exfiltration can be seen. The ALMA Observatory also expressed that they were prepared for the situation and had proper infrastructure.

The Observatory

The ALMA Observatory, a state-of-the-art telescope, is located on the Chajnantor plateau, elevated at 16,400 ft. It has 66 high-precision telescopes of 12m diameter and is arranged in two arrays. It is the world's most expensive ground telescope, and was developed by the US, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile. The collective effort made it possible to build the $1.4 billion telescope.

Tim de Zeeuw, Director General of the European Southern Observatory, said that even in the early phases of ALMA, it already outperforms all the submillimeter arrays.ALMA uses millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths in light to observe the universe. That is around a thousand times longer than visible light wavelengths, according to the ESO website.

With this, astronomers are able to study dense clouds of cosmic dust and gas, from which stars and planets form, and even distant objects from the early universe. It also helps that ALMA was built at a higher altitude. Signals from space are absorbed by the water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere, and the Chajnantor Plateau is perfectly dry and a high place for the telescope.

What ALMA Has Made Possible

Seeing as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Observatory is the most powerful telescope in the world, it has been a tool used to discover many great things. It has provided images for protoplanetary disks like HL Tau. This helped change the previously accepted theories about planetary formation.

It has even observed phenomena at a level of resolution, not even the Hubble Space Telescope can manage. One phenomenon for instance is the Einstein Rings in detail. It also managed to detect organic molecules in space. That includes carbon-based and pre-biotic structures, which signifies that our Solar System is not the only suited galaxy to sustain life.

ALMA was also instrumental in pioneering comet and planetary studies, and participated in the Event Horizon project, which aims to photograph the first black hole for the first time. So far, ALMA is the biggest ground-based astronomical project to date. This was all made possible by global collaboration, ushering in new technology for us to understand space more.