The Simons Observatory will be located in the high Atacama Desert in Northern Chile inside the Chajnator Science Preserve, at an altitude of 5,200 meters (17,000 ft). The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the Simons Array are currently making observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Their goals are to study how the universe began, what it is made of, and how it evolved to its current state. The Simons Observatory will add to these several new telescopes and new cameras with state of the art detector arrays. This has been made possible by a combined $40.1 million grant from the Simons Foundation and a number of participating universities.
The observatory is currently in its definition phase. It is envisaged that one of its telescopes would be a precursor for an element of the proposed CMB-S4 array.