Recent news
There have been a number of important events in the ALMA project in the last three months. On an international level, the bilateral agreement was signed by NSF (on behalf of North America) and ESO (on behalf of Europe) on February 25, 2003. On a national level, everyone involved in ALMA was very exited to see it mentioned by name in the Federal Budget speech and text on February 18, 2003. Both internationally and nationally, I think we can safely say that ALMA has arrived!
The first meeting of the ALMA Board was held in a very snowy Washington, D. C. February 24-25, 2003. The Canadian representative on the Board is Jim Hesser; I attended the meeting as the chair of the ALMA Science Advisory Committee (ASAC) and Lorne Avery also attended as Canadian ALMA Project Manager. The highlight of the meeting for me was seeing the bilateral agreement signed by Catherine Cesarsky, Director General of ESO.
On the North American side of ALMA, the Director of NRAO, Fred Lo, is forming a North American ALMA Science Advisory Group (NASAG). This group will include the North American members of the ASAC as well as about ten additional astronomers from across the continent. Doug Johnstone and I will be the initial Canadian members of this new committee and I look forward to being able to report on its activities and plans in a future update. The first meeting of the NASAG is tentatively planned for May or June, 2003.
ALMA Science Advisory Committee
Under the new bilateral ALMA agreement, the ASAC will be composed of five members from each partner. The new ASAC members for North America are Chris Carilli (NRAO), Phil Myers (CfA), and Jean Turner (UCLA) with Lee Mundy (Maryland) and myself as continuing members. The new European members for the ASAC will be chosen from the new European ALMA Science Advisory Committee sometime in May.
I would like to use this forum to recognize and thank outgoing ASAC members Arnold Benz (ETH Zurich), Geoff Blake (Caltech), Roy Booth (Onsala), Dick Crutcher (Illinois), Mark Gurwell (CfA), Malcolm Walmsley (Arcetri), David Wilner (CfA), and Min Yun (UMass) for all their hard work on the ASAC over the past several years.
Since its last face-to-face meeting in September, 2002, the ASAC has been considering a proposal for an upgrade to the ALMA Baseline Correlator (see ALMA memo 441) and has been developing a number of science examples that can be used in illustrating the calibration plan for ALMA. We have also been following progress on various software issues. The European members of the ASAC helped to organize a one-day meeting on ALMA Science Operations at ESO Garching in November. This meeting was to update the astronomical community on the recent developments in the ALMA project and to solicit input on the plans for science operations and user support. The meeting was very well attended with 100 participants from all over Europe. Several presentations were given (available on the ESO ALMA web page) and there were lively discussions about science operations, software, and possible enhancements to the baseline ALMA project.
The seventh face-to-face meeting of the ASAC will be held April 2-3, 2003 in Grenoble, France. This meeting will focus on several specific charges to the ASAC from the ALMA Board, which were still under development at the time this article was written.
ALMA Developments in Canada
One of the most exciting things for me in the last year was to see ALMA mentioned by name in the Federal Budget. I'm told that it was actually in the Minister's speech (which I didn't hear). ALMA and the EVLA were mentioned together in the written budget summary and the larger budget document available on the web site as well. While I'm sure there are details to be worked out (as there always seem to be) this was a huge step forward, both for ALMA and for Canadian astronomy as a whole.
At HIA, Victoria, the Band 3 team is concentrating on design and tests of key components for the ALMA receiver cartridges for the 84-116 GHz band. Discussions are also under way with the ALMA Project Office to arrive at a detailed Statement of Work to define fully the deliverables, schedule and milestones of this 10-year long receiver project.
Preliminary tests of the elemental Band 3 mixer are under way to establish baseline performance relative to the stringent ALMA specifications. Although the radio frequency (RF) bandwidth appears to be adequate, the noise temperature of ~ 35 K double sideband (DSB) is about twice the specification, and it was obtained in a relatively narrow intermediate frequency (IF) bandwidth of 3.5 to 4.5 GHz. A 4-12 GHz low-noise amplifier recently delivered by the NRAO Central Development Laboratory (CDL) will soon be installed in this test system. It is expected that this will improve the performance by a few degrees. In addition, effort is being spent on design of the warm IF chain and the automated test facilities that will be required during the cartridge production phase.
Doug Johnstone has been preparing a memo illustrating the relative tradeoffs between double sideband and single sideband design for the Band 3 (3 mm) receivers for ALMA. He hopes to place this in the ALMA memo series eventually; please contact him if you are interested in receiving a copy.
The ALMA Software Preliminary Design Review will be held in Tucson on March 18,19. Raymond Rusk at HIA, Penticton, has been involved in ALMA Software and will be attending the review. Raymond is the first of the Canadians to be involved with ALMA software. Additional hires to bring this effort to the required level are expected to proceed quickly. Members of HIA's Canadian Astronomy Data Centre participated in an ALMA Archive Planning Workshop held in Victoria in January. The CADC is contributing to planning the design of the Archive, as part of Canada's involvement in ALMA software.
In January, 2003, I spent a week in Garching with the rest of the ALMA Data Reduction Pipeline team to work on the design of the Pipeline and its interaction with the ALMA Data Reduction User Interface. At the same time, we were also working on completing Phase I of the AIPS++/IRAM re-use test and starting Phases II and III. Broadly speaking, the goals of these tests were to see how AIPS++ could be adapted to reducing data from a millimeter-wave array for which it was not originally designed. Phase I involved the calibration and imaging of a specific IRAM Plateau de Bure data set. Phase II involved applying the tools developed in Phase I to a number of other IRAM data sets by users who were not necessarily experts in AIPS++. I participated in Phase II of the tests and, despite no prior experience with AIPS++ or Plateau de Bure data, was able to successfully calibrate and image data from a carbon star which was kindly made available to me by Robert Lucas. For others who might be interested in using AIPS++ for VLA, IRAM, or BIMA data, I'd like to say that the AIPS++ installation is much, much easier than the AIPS installation and that cookbooks now exist which can guide you through the various steps. I can attest for the excellence of the IRAM AIPS++ cookbook and I suspect the others are of similar high quality.
Chris Wilson wilson@physics.mcmaster.ca
Canadian ALMA Project Scientist
(with contributions from Lorne Avery, Stephane Claude, and Keith Yeung)