ASTE observations of dense molecular gas in galaxies

Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment (ASTE) is a joint project between Japan and Chile for installing and operating a 10 m high precision telescope in the Atacama Desert in order to explore the southern sky through the submillimeter wavelength. We have achieved an accuracy of 19 m (rms) for the main reflector surface and a stable radio pointing accuracy of about 2 arcsec (rms). A 350 GHz cartridge type SIS mixer receiver achieves good performance with a typical system noise temperature of 150 ~ 250 K in DSB and a main beam efficiency of 0.6 ~ 0.7 during winter nights. A large scale CO(3-2) imaging survey of nearby galaxies using ASTE is now in progress. One of our goals is to compare our wide area CO(3-2) images with existing CO(1-0) data as well as distributions of massive star formation tracers (i.e., H and radio continuum emission) in order to understand the physical mechanism which controls the global star formation properties such as star formation efficiency. Initial CO(3-2) maps of some sample galaxies (M 83, NGC 604 in M 33, NGC 1672, & NGC 7130) are reported.