The telescope is designed for conducting large-area millimeter and sub-millimeter wave surveys of faint, low contrast emission, in order to map primary and secondary anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background.

The first key project will be to conduct a survey of approximately 4,000 square degrees for galaxy clusters using the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect. This survey should find many thousands of clusters with a mass selection criteria that is remarkably uniform with redshift. Armed with redshifts obtained from optical and infrared follow-up observations, it is expected that the survey will enable significant constraints to be placed on the equation of state of the dark energy.