ALMA Update
1 Recent news
1.1 Construction Progress
The President of the NINS (National Institute for National Sciences, Japan)
signed the ALMA agreement on July 4, 2006 and the agreement was
signed shortly afterwards by ESO and NSF. We can now formally welcome our
East Asian colleagues to the ALMA project. To remind my readers,
this agreement will add the Atacama
Compact Array (12 x 7m dishes), four 12m antennas to be used for total
power (single dish) observations, and two additional receiver bands (Band
4 at 2 mm and band 8 at 0.6 mm) to the "baseline" ALMA project.
ESO has signed the contract for the construction of the Operations
Support Facility (OSF).
The first ALMA
antenna pad was completed on June 29
at the Vertex Site Erection Facility (SEF), which
is located at the 2900 m site of the OSF.
Construction of the underground utilities to
the Vertex, Melco and Alcatel SEF is under
way and expected to finish on August 9. Fabrication of SEF building is
nearing completion and planned to be shipped to Chile in August.
Factory acceptance tests for the Vertex production antenna azimuth
and elevation bearings have been successfully completed.
The first delivered
Band 7 (0.85 mm) cartridge from IRAM was tested at the North
American Front End Integration Center, with
Provisional Acceptance on-Site (PAS) completed.
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Figure 1: Steel is being cut for the Vertex antenna. The plan is
to erect the antenna first
in Texas in October and then at the OSF in early 2007.
This picture from August 23 shows the base of the yoke. |
A major revision of the ALMA Operations Plan is underway which will
incorporate the Japanese contribution of hardware and operations funds
and will include a revised budget.
A major task for the North American
community is securing the money for ALMA operations, which will ramp
up over the next few years in preparation for Early Science observations
in 2010. NRAO is working to a deadline this fall to submit a proposal
for ALMA Operations funding to the NSF.
The ALMA project is looking to fill key positions as the project ramps
up towards assembly, integration, verification, and commissioning.
Interviews have been conducted towards hiring a head of science operations
and a new search is underway to hire an ALMA Project scientist. Anyone
interested in this position can find the job ad on the NRAO or ESO web pages
and Jim Hesser would be happy to talk to anyone who is thinking about
applying for this position.
Finally, the ALMA Science team is working to update the ALMA Design Reference
Science Plan (DRSP) to include new projects, especially projects that will use
the two new receiver bands being contributed by Japan and projects that
need to use the Atacama Compact Array. Information on the DRSP is a
available at
http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~alma/drsp.shtml
Anyone interested in participating in the update of the DRSP can contact
Chris Wilson or James di Francesco (HIA) for more information.
1.2 ALMA Science Meetings
ALMA was well represented at the recent IAU meeting in Prague. In addition
to a special session on ALMA, Jean Turner gave a standing-room only
talk on ALMA at the
session on "Astronomical Facilities of the Next Decade".
The second world-wide
meeting on "Science with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array" will be
held in Madrid, Spain, on 13-16 November 2006. Registration for this
meeting is now closed with approximately 40 people on a waiting list.
The conference will cover a wide range of topics, which will
include the main scientific drivers of ALMA: the formation and evolution
of galaxies, the physics and chemistry of the interstellar medium, and the
processes of star and planet formation. The web page
for the conference, including the preliminary scientific program
and registration information, is available at
http://www.oan.es/alma2006/
NRAO is planning a science workshop on
"Transformational Science with ALMA: Through Disks to Stars and Planets"
to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia June 22-24, 2007. This workshop will
likely be limited to about 60 people so I encourage anyone who is interested
to watch for the web page to appear and to register early.
2 ALMA Science Advisory Committee
The ASAC will be meeting September 16-17, 2006 in Florence, Italy.
The ASAC has three charges for the meeting:
to review the revised Commissioning and Science Verification
Plan for ALMA; to review the revised Calibration Plan for ALMA; and to
review the existing work on developing complete descriptions of the
ALMA observing modes (e.g. software, hardware etc.) and make
recommendations as to their relative priority. We will also be
discussing progress in the development of the scientific software
and the structure of the ALMA TAC. I will report on the
results of these discussions in my next newsletter.
3 ALMA Developments in Canada
3.1 Canadian ALMA Science Steering Committee
The Canadian ALMA Science Steering Committee (CASSC) met Sept 10-11, 2006
at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria.
The primary focus of the meeting was to
discuss the charges given to the ASAC for their September 2006 meeting
and to consider how to position Canada to participate to maximum
advantage in ALMA Operations. We also discussed outreach to the Canadian
astronomy community and heard short reports on
the Band 3 development effort and the software effort, including
the ALMA archive.
Since the report from the meeting is not yet available, I want to
highlight just one critical issue. ALMA work in Canada continues
to need the second infusion of funds that was forseen in the original
Long Range Plan (LRP) and has been requested as part of the LRP mid-term
review. We are in our final year of the money that was allocated five years
ago and new money is absolutely required if we are to continue and complete
our construction commitments to ALMA, including the very visible and
high priority Band 3 receiver work.
I will give a more complete summary of the report from the CASSC in my
next newsletter.
3.2 Band 3 Receiver Development
The Band 3 Receiver Development Team has been extremely busy over the
last months. Important documents, including the Statement of Work,
acceptance procedures, and specifications, have been either completed
or are now awaiting final signatures. These items are of critical
importance and they determine the rigorous specifications that the Band
3 receivers must attain. Additionally, automation of the mixer test
sets is now complete, which allows noise measurement tests to be completed
in two and a half days with little operator supervision.
A number of milestones are on the horizon for the Band 3 team as well.
The preliminary in-house acceptance of the first cartridge, necessary
before the receiver can be shipped, is to take place in late September,
with delivery of the first cartridge to NRAO soon after. The second
cartridge is slated for delivery in early November. The very important
critical design review of the Band 3 receiver is planned for January of
next year.
These highlights and many more details were presented to the Canadian
ALMA Science Steering Committee at the September face-to-face meeting.
The Committee was extremely impressed by both the quality of the Band 3
Receiver and the management of the project.
For more information on the ALMA Band 3 Receiver Project contact Keith
Yeung (Project Manager, keith.yeung@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca), Stephane Claude
(Project Engineer, stephane.claude@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca), or Doug Johnstone
(Project Scientist, doug.johnstone@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca).
3.3 Software
Software work for the ALMA Offline system and the ALMA Common Software
system is continuing in Calgary and at DRAO.
Raymond Rusk has completed porting of the images and
coordsys tools from the old AIPS++ framework to the new CASA framework
and the tools are ready for thorough
testing. In the new framework, these tools are coded in C++ but
accessible from Python. Previously they were coded in a mixture of
Glish and C++ and accessed using Glish scripts. The next step with
respect to these two tools is converting the image test scripts from
Glish to Python which will allow for much more extensive testing.
Raymond also reports that the measures component implementation is
complete and has being tested against examples from the AIPS++ User
Reference Manual. The Python and Glish output are in good agreement.
He now needs to update the documentation for the measures, images, and
coordsys tools so that examples in the documents show Python rather
than Glish.
In an attempt to meet tight deadlines, porting of the quanta tool that is
used to manipulate units and quantities was re-assigned from a developer
in Socorro to Raymond. Raymond has also been given the
high-priority task of porting Juan Pardo's recently updated
atmospheric modeling code to CASA; this code is
used in the ALMA Telescope Calibration package.
Shannon Jaeger, who has replaced Gary Li at the University of Calgary,
has been working on bug fixes and enhancements to the msplot
component. Msplot is a key tool used for plotting, displaying,
listing, and editing CASA MeasurementSets. Shannon has also done some
work on porting the functionals tool to CASA.
In August, Shannon and Raymond attended the millimeter observing
techniques workshop in Victoria where they had the opportunity to meet
many potential ALMA users. In mid-October, Shannon and Raymond will
be traveling to Tucson to attend ADASS 2006 and to Socorro to spend
some time working face-to-face with the off-line development team at
NRAO.
The process of replacing David Fugate, our former ACS worker at the
University of Calgary, has moved to the stage that short-listed candidates
are being interviewed. It is hoped that this position will be filled
soon. Lewis Knee is heading the selection committee. Raymond Rusk,
Gianluca Chiozzi, and Heiko Sommer are the other panel members.
The CADC has recently hired a new operations manger, freeing Norm
Hill from his acting operations manager duties. This will allow him to
begin work in late September on the requirements gathering phase of
the design and implementation of the Request Handler component of the
Archive system. He is currently attending the US-VO Summer School in
Aspen, in part to develop an understanding Virtual Observatory data
access protocols and how they will influence the design of the
Request Handler. Norm has been attending the weekly ALMA Archive team
teleconferences.
Chris Wilson is working on planning for the fourth ALMA Pipeline User
Test which will begin later this fall. James di Francesco from HIA
will be one of the testers. This test will be the first one to
involve flagging, calibration, and imaging of the scientific target in
addition to the calibrators.
Aknowledgments
Thanks to Séverin Gaudet, Doug Johnstone, and Raymond Rusk for contributions to this article.
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Chris Wilson - Canadian ALMA Project Scientist
wilson@physics.mcmaster.ca |
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On 18 Sep 2006, 22:54.
