Its initial goals were to survey the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in order to measure its fine-scale anisotropies and to find clusters of galaxies.

One of the most important developments of the last few years has been the detection, through observations of the CMB and supernova studies, of a form of energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe.

The SZA has been used for multi-wavelength observations of over 100 galaxy clusters, both on its own and as a part of the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA), which was decommissioned after 3 April 2015.

The 8 SZA telescopes are small enough to be placed very close together, which provides maximum sensitivity to the (large-scale) SZ signal from clusters.

When the SZA was combined with the other telescopes in the CARMA array, which had longer separations and were sensitive to finer angular scales, it formed a complete picture of galaxy clusters at very high resolution.