Its mission is to explore the universe, study its origins and its evolution with two of the most advanced radio facilities in the world: Both sites are at high altitude to reduce the absorption by water vapour in Earth's atmosphere.

The principal activity of IRAM is the study of mostly cold matter (interstellar molecular gas and cosmic dust) in the Solar System, in our Milky Way, and other galaxies out to cosmological distances in order to determine their composition, physical parameters and history.

[4] Together with the IRAM 30-meter telescope it made the first complete and detailed radio images of nearby galaxies and their gas.

[5][6][7][8][9] NOEMA also obtained the first image of a gas disk surrounding a double star system (Dutrey al. 1994[10]).

Its antennas captured for the first time a cavity in one of these disks, a major hint for the existence of a planetary object orbiting the new star and absorbing matter on its trajectory (GG tau, Piétu et al. 2011[11]).