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Scientific Motivation

The frequency range accessible to the proposed array receiver contains many low-excitation transitions of abundant atomic and molecular species. These are important as diagnostics of a wide variety of astronomical phenomena including interstellar clouds, star-forming regions, young stellar objects, circumstellar envelopes, planetary nebulae, starburst galaxies, and planetary atmospheres. The high spatial and spectral resolution of the array will be crucial in many applications, e.g., the study of Galactic star-forming regions, where structure is expected on spatial scales of less than 10 arcseconds and velocity scales of a few km s tex2html_wrap_inline248 . The number and types of possible observational projects for the proposed instrument are virtually limitless. In this section we present brief descriptions of only a few of the projects which are well suited for the array.