Abstract
This contribution reviews the science goals of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), particularly the `Level One' goals. ALMA is a large international telescope project which is being built in northern Chile on a site at 5km elevation. The site, Chajnantor, provides excellent atmospheric transmission in the millimeter and submillimeter wavelength ranges. The project consists of two components: (a) the ``12m Array'' composed of up to sixty four 12-meter antennas that can be placed on 175 different stations for baselines up to 18 km and (b) the ``Atacama Compact Array'', or ACA, that consists of twelve 7-meter antennas and four 12-meter antennas placed in compact configurations adjacent to the 12m Array for measuring source total power. Thus, ALMA will provide images of high sensitivity, over complete frequency coverage and at high dynamic range which accurately portray the distribution of the total flux toward a particular source from millimeter and submillimeter photons, the most abundant photons in the Universe. At the shortest planned wavelength, λ=0.3mm, and longest baseline, the angular resolution will be 0.004 arcseconds. The six highest frequency receiver bands will be available at the end of construction, each observing both polarizations with a bandwidth of 8 GHz.
