The Soviet Maksutov AZT-16 Telescope in Chile: Technology and Geopolitics in Latin America’s Cold War (1959 – 1973)

Abstract

Chile is reputed to be the country that received the largest ever made Maksutov telescope, the AZT – 16 instrument. Aimed at studying the stars of the southern hemisphere, it was installed in 1967 as part of a scientific mission led by the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and the National Observatory of Pulkovo. The telescope was designed by Dmitri Dmítrievich Maksútov (1896 – 1964), and it was considered to be a remarkable advancement for optical engineering. Despite the international campaign initiated in the 1950s by the director of the National Observatory of the Universidad de Chile, professor Federico Rutllant, to promote the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, the Soviet mission was installed in the less favourable locations of Calán and El Roble hills nearby Santiago. Presenting the geographical positioning of imported technologies as the unstable balance between science and politics, and by documenting a historically important but lesser studied set of Cold War relationships—those between the Soviet Union and Latin America, the Makzutov AZT – 16 enables the unfolding of the frictions between Soviet technologically objects and the role of their distribution both in Chile and in the South America context.