Recent news
A major reorganization of the ALMA committees has begun, driven by the move from the design and development phase into the construction phase. The ALMA Coordinating Committee (ACC) has made interim appointments for the Joint ALMA Project office. P. van den Bout has been appointed as interim Project Director, M. Tarenghi as interim Project Manager, and S. Guilloteau as interim Project Scientist. They will work full-time on the ALMA project. Advertisements will appear shortly for applications to fill these positions permanently. The ACC has also decided that the size of the ASAC will be reduced to five members each from Europe and North America, in addition to three ex-officio project scientist positions. The ACC itself will be replace by the ALMA Board, which will be established once the international agreement has been signed in late October. The board itself will be comprised of four members per partner.
One of the top priorities for the ALMA project over the last few months has been working towards obtaining access to the site in Chile. There will be a full environmental impact study, which is expected to take 6-12 months, before the legal right to the site can be approved. One of the items that will be assessed as part of this study is the impact on the indigenous population.
The North American prototype ALMA antenna built by Vertex/RSI is now being erected at the ALMA Test Facility (ATF) on the VLA site in New Mexico. Delivery of this prototype is one of the highly visible early milestones of the ALMA Project. The European prototype antenna, which is being designed and built by the ACE Consortium, is scheduled for delivery to the ATF in April 2003. It is also likely that a Japanese prototype antenna will be erected at the ATF in spring of 2003. When the Vertex antenna is assembled later this summer, extensive single dish testing of the Vertex prototype will begin, with plans to evaluate the performance of the other two prototypes when they are available. You can check the daily progress of the antenna construction by accessing the site camera at
http://www.tuc.nrao.edu/ jmangum/alma/atf/
A computer rendition of what the completed Vertex antenna will look like at the ATF is available at
http://www.mma.nrao.edu/images/Vertexdesign.pdf
The first ``ALMA week'' was held April 22-26, 2002 in Granada, Spain. There were meetings on the front end, calibration, photonics, configuration, software, and science software requirements, as well as a Preliminary Design Review for the backend. In the front end, W. Wild is leaving as team leader and C. Cunningham (HIA) will serve as acting team leader. The overall schedule to design and produce the receivers is an important issue. A Calibration Group was formed at the meeting and will be led by B. Butler (NRAO). There were reports on various calibration techniques and atmospheric radiometry calibration. In the area of configurations, work is continuing on the smaller configurations. For the largest configuration, there is a new idea to use a Y-type configuration instead of a ring around Chascon as previously proposed. There is a new ALMA memo describing the Y+ configuration. The software group has recruited subsystem project scientists in ten areas and working on an audit and subsequent benchmarking of aips++ for ALMA data reduction. (I have been asked to join the ALMA Software Science Requirements committee and will act as subsystem scientist for pipeline processing.) The backend system is proceeding well and there appear to be no important technical risks. A prototype backend will be ready by Fall 2003.
In other news, the Japanese ASTE telescope has arrived at its observing site in Pampa La Bolla (which is just down the road from the planned ALMA site at an elevation roughly 200 m lower). Along with its scientific capabilities, this 10 m telescope may allow the opportunity to test ALMA prototype receiver cartridges under conditions extremely similar to the ALMA site.
ALMA Science Advisory Committee
The ASAC met in Tokyo March 19-21, 2002. Reports were presented on the prototype antennae; the schedules for the European and Japanese prototypes are very tight. Reports were presented on the work on prototype receivers as well as plans for production of these receivers. Final decisions will have to be taken soon on the design of the production receivers. The results of software tests involving aips++ were presented; the final report is expected to be available shortly. There was extensive discussion on scientific operations, including the concept of the Regional Support Centers and various models for scientific evaluation of ALMA proposals.
The ASAC emphasized again that every effort should be made to allow Japan to become a full partner in a future 3-way ALMA project, since the enhancements that would be possible from their participation are so scientifically valuable. The ASAC felt that system engineering, and calibration in particular, remain areas where more investment by the ALMA project is needed. The establishment of the Calibration Group is a good step forward. Regarding software, the ASAC suggested again that the software group defines a core program to test both the pipeline and offline analysis software and obtain early user feedback. At this meeting, I was elected to a 6-month term as Vice-Chair of the ASAC; I will chair the committee in the months leading up to the March 2003 face-to-face meeting.
The next face-to-face meeting of the ASAC is planned for September 7-8, 2002 in Socorro, New Mexico. We will be preparing for this meeting over the next few months, including working on four tasks which have been passed to us from the ACC. These tasks are: to evaluate all available site data and to discuss any issues which may impact the scientific mission or design of ALMA; to assess ALMA early science, including what types of data are likely to be most desired as ALMA begins operations; to summarize the scientific and technical issues associated with the long baseline array geometries (ring versus Y+); and to reassess the list of prioritized enhancements that Japan should be asked to contribute to the baseline ALMA instrument. This reassessment is required both because the level of financial contribution from Japan is not yet known and because the current construction plan requires Japan to contribute all the enhancements, rather than sharing in the construction of the baseline project.
ALMA Developments in Canada
At the time of writing, we are still awaiting word of the results of the CFI proposal to seek funding for ALMA site infrastructure and the Expanded VLA correlator (titled Canadian Participation in the North American Program in Radio Astronomy). Results are expected to be announced very soon.
One of the most visible and important tasks allocated to Canada as part of ALMA construction is the design and construction of the 3 mm (Band 3) receivers. The Band 3 group at HIA held a Conceptual Design Review on June 7, 2002. The review committee was made up of Stephane Claude (IRAM), Tony Kerr (NRAO), John Payne (NRAO), and myself as chair. We had a very full day of reports on various aspects of the technical design of the receiver, the plan for staffing the work up to the start of production in 2006, various ideas for how to involve industry in the production phase, and finished with a tour of the numerous facilities available at HIA. The committee members felt that the review was very useful and that the Band 3 team had done a good job pulling all the information on what needs to be done to design and produce the prototype receiver into a single set of documents. I know that I myself came away from the meeting with a much better picture of all the work involved in designing receivers for ALMA and of the complicated nature of decisions that involve different parts of the ALMA project. We are currently in the process of finalizing our report, which I hope will be made public after the team has had a chance to respond to our comments.
We are planning to hold the next meeting of the Canadian ALMA Science Steering Committee (CASSC) August 12-13, 2002 in Victoria, B.C. The current members of the CASSC are Ernie Seaquist, Jean-Rene Roy, Chris Pritchet, Rene Plume, David Naylor, Doug Johnstone, and myself. If you have any questions, concerns, or issues that you think this committee should discuss, please feel free to contact any CASSC member.
Chris Wilson wilson@physics.mcmaster.ca
Canadian ALMA Project Scientist