ALMA Update

1 Recent news

ALMA held an official ground-breaking ceremony in early November in conjunction with the Board meeting in Chile. The project also finally has an official logo! Chile is now officially part of the ALMA project and the agreement for the land in Chile was signed in late November.

There has been a lot of work done over the last few months testing the first prototype ALMA antenna on the VLA site. The second prototype antenna is also now on the site and is undergoing finishing touches by the contractors. The Request for Proposals to build the 64 ALMA antennas is expected to go out later this month. This is a very important milestone for the ALMA project, as the antennas are the single most expensive item in the ALMA budget.

The ALMA Board and the Joint ALMA Office are continuing their search to fill the positions of Project Scientist, Project Manager, and Project Engineer. Within Europe, Tom Wilson has been appointed as the new European Project Scientist and Robert Laing as the Instrument Project Scientist. The U.S. Congress recently approved the next NSF budget, including funding for the next fiscal year for ALMA. This budget still needs to be signed by the President.

There are various outreach/community activities planned on the North American side of ALMA over the next six months. There will be an ALMA Town Hall meeting held on Thursday, January 8th, 2004 at the AAS meeting. Plans are also underway for a two-day ALMA Science Workshop, which is tentatively scheduled for May 24-25, 2004 at the University of Maryland. This workshop will be an excellent way for people who are interested in using ALMA to find out about ALMA and ALMA science and I encourage you to consider attending if you can. Finally, there will be an invited talk on ALMA by Suzanne Aalto-Bergman from the Onsala Space Observatory at the CASCA meeting in Winnipeg June 12-16, 2004.

In Canada, Lorne Avery has retired as head of the Millimetre Astronomy Group at HIA. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Lorne for all his hard work on ALMA over the last several years. Lorne played a very important role in facilitating Canada's participation in ALMA from the technical and managerial side and we will miss his wisdom and expertise. Lewis Knee will be moving from DRAO to be the new head of the Millimetre Astronomy Group at HIA and I look forward to working with Lewis on ALMA in the future.

2 ALMA Science Advisory Committee

The ALMA Science Advisory Committee (ASAC) met September 5-6, 2003 at McMaster University. After the meeting, Lee Mundy from the University of Maryland became the new chair of the ASAC.

A major focus of the meeting was the discussion of the first draft of the Design Reference Science Plan. The goal of this plan is to collect a suite of "typical" proposals for things that ALMA might do in its first three years of full operation. The information from these pseudo-proposals will be used as a guide in operations planning ans software development, as well as providing an exciting snapshot of the potential science that ALMA will do. After the ASAC meeting the "proposals" were reviewed and revised and the full Plan has now been approved for public distribution by the board. I encourage you to take a look at the ALMA Design Reference Science Plan at

http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~joergens/alma/index.shtml

The other major focus of the meeting was the discussion of the calibration plans for ALMA. The ASAC recommended that the goal for amplitude calibration for ALMA remain at 1% below 300 GHz and 3% above 300 GHz, but noted that the most important aspect of this goal was the repeatability of the amplitude calibration. Since the calibration plan for ALMA is still in progress, the ASAC will likely consider calibration issues at its next meeting as well.

One area of concern was the stability of the receiver gains, which affect the ability of ALMA to make high-fidelity, wide-field continuum images and also have an impact on accurate polarization observations. Simulations suggest that a stability of 1 part in 10⁴ is required for accurate imaging. Although tests presented to the ASAC on a prototype ALMA system initially suggested the stability could be 10 times worse than this specification, new tests with a redesigned testing setup gave much better results.

The ASAC also heard a report from ALMA Computing on developments that are relevant to user software. Brian Glendenning outlined the new organization of the aips++ group at NRAO and their new focus on delivering software that is critical for ALMA. The plan is to demonstrate important aips++ functionality in the ALMA data reduction pipeline by the second software Critical Design Review in May 2003. The plans for detailed user testing of ALMA software were also described as well as progress in benchmarking aips++ in comparison to other interferometric packages.

The September 2003 ASAC report is available via Al Wootten's web site at

http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~awootten/mmaimcal/asac_report_open_2003_sep.pdf

3 ALMA Developments in Canada

3.1 Software

With the CFI funding for ALMA now in place, we are in the process of hiring into two software positions at the University of Calgary. The people hired to these two positions will complement the one position filled at NRC by Raymond Rusk to execute the Canadian contribution to the development of ALMA software.

Raymond Rusk continued his work on the ALMA prototype pipeline system. He has also been playing an important role in benchmarking the speed of aips++ against comparable interferometry packages. Chris Wilson attend the recent meeting of the ALMA Science Software Requirements Committee in Socorro, New Mexico. A major focus of the meeting was the status of the various software subsystems and the plans to begin user tests of some of the key components. She will participate as a tester in the first user test of the Offline Data Reduction Package (based on aips++), which will start mid-January. She also helped use the Design Reference Science Plan to estimate the data rates that ALMA will produce.

3.2 IRMA

The IRMA project has now received permission from the SMA telescope in Hawaii to test three IRMA devices there early in 2004. This will enable the project to perform extensive testing and attempt to provide the SMA with phase correction information. The first prototype had its initial cooldown in the first week of December and final assembly and testing is progressing well. The attached picture shows the complete IRMA optics plate with cooler, vacuum vessel (containing the detector and filter assembly) and the primary mirror. More details can be obtained in December's monthly report at

http://research.uleth.ca/irma

Chris Wilson wilson@physics.mcmaster.ca

Canadian ALMA Project Scientist

(with contributions from Robin Phillips)

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On 19 Dec 2003, 00:14.