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The Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (IAA) of Taiwan's Academia Sinica in Taipei was created 10 years ago, but its scientists didn't have access to a world-class instrument. Academy officials decided that their best bet for reaching the big leagues would be to piggyback on SMA, being built by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by offering to add two antennas to the six originally planned. The idea, in the words of IAA's director, Sun Kwok, was to "offer young scientists a good reason to come to Taiwan." And Nagayoshi Ohashi, a Japanese national and a physics graduate of Nagoya University, is living proof that the strategy has worked. Ohashi held a temporary post at the Smithsonian, working on SMA, when IAA came calling. The IAA position "gave me a chance to continue my work" on circumstellar disks, he says. "Because IAA is a young institute, I will have more of a chance to explore my scientific interests and develop my own group." IAA has also hired scientists from Australia, France, Germany, Vietnam, and South Korea as well as mainland China. "We are not just a Chinese institution," says Kwok. James Moran, SMA's director, says that the collaboration with IAA was a win-win situation for both institutions. One reason is cost: The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which began planning for SMA in 1984, has spent $80 million for the design and construction of six antennas, and IAA has chipped in another $12 million. The partnership has also created a more powerful instrument. Because image quality improves as a function of the number of baselines, or connections between any two antennas, Moran says that adding two antennas has "nearly doubled the efficiency of the array" by boosting the number of connections from 15 to 28. In addition, Taiwanese companies have built some of SMA's key components, and IAA has contributed significant brainpower to the project. IAA is already using SMA as a springboard to bigger and better things. Its scientists are developing a 19-element array on Hawaii's Mauna Loa to probe the age of the universe. "The experience gained on SMA has allowed us to do something on our own," Kwok says. IAA is getting support from Australian scientists on the project, called the Array for Microwave Background Anisotropy. But this time, IAA is taking the lead. The information comes from science magazine. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5649/1313a