ALMA Update

1 Recent news

1.1 Construction Progress

At its November meeting the Board approved the 2007 construction budget of 67.4M Euros plus US$96.8M for the bilateral project (the East Asian construction contributions are largely made in-kind (as are Canada's), earning value within the partnership that results in access to observing time). 2007 is projected to be the peak spending year for ALMA construction, although 2006 and 2008 are nearly as large.

Work on the foundation for the Operations Support Facility (OSF) Technical Building is underway at the 9600 foot level. When completed in 2008, this building will be the main center for ALMA operations. Construction of the Assembly, Integration, and Verification building at the OSF site was completed on schedule November 7.

At the high site, construction work to finish the interior of the building at the Array Operations Site (AOS) is progressing well. The building is expected to be fully enclosed and powered with a temporary generator by late January 2007 and will also have a temporary communications link to the OSF. The design and engineering of the antenna layout, road system, power, and fiber optic cable has been completed out to the four km configuration. Design work on the more extended arrays is ongoing.

Testing work is proceeding well at the ALMA Test Facility (ATF) at the VLA site in New Mexico. A first round of holography testing was completed this fall; more holography is scheduled for the week before Christmas. The central Local Oscillator (LO) has been relocated from Socorro to the VLA building and the master laser has been successfully powered up. The prototype correlator is being moved to the ATF and we expect to get first fringes using the two prototype antennas early in the new year.

At the North American Front End Integration Center (FEIC) in Charlottesville, Virginia, the first beam map was made using a production cryostat and a Band 6 (1.3 mm) receiver. The first cartridges for Band 3 (3 mm, HIA), Band 6 (1.3 mm, NRAO) and Band 7 (0.8 mm, IRAM) have all been installed in the first front end. All receiver bands are healthy and integration of the front end subsystem is continuing. I discuss more detailed progress on Band 3 later in this report.

Some key personnel have recently been hired for ALMA. Lars-Å ke Nyman has been hired as the new Head of Science Operations and comes to ALMA with extensive Chilean operations experience from SEST and APEX. Russell Smeback has been recruited as the new Head of Administration. Interviews for the last open position in the Joint ALMA Office, the ALMA Project Scientist, took place during the Madrid science meeting in November.

1.2 ALMA Operations

Operations staff must be hired and trained during the construction, assembly, integration, and verification phase, so that they will be ready to begin operations, both in Chile and in the ALMA Regional Centres, as antennae are released for commissioning and operations. Accordingly, operations ramp-up must begin in earnest in 2007, for which the Board approved a budget totalling US$5.1M. The 2007 North American share is US$1.9M, of which Canada is responsible for 7.25%; these figures include the early costs of the ALMA Regional Centers. East Asia is fully integrated into the operations contributions. The importance cannot be over emphasized of securing the second round of LRP funding for completing our construction obligations and meeting our new operations obligations.

Doug Johnstone, Lewis Knee and Chris Wilson provided detailed comments regarding Version B of the Operations Plan for Jim Hesser's input to the Operations Working Group. This detailed plan links operations staffing to individual construction milestones. The Board is organizing an independent review of the Operations Plan by an international panel for late February. In parallel, the NSF will have AUI/NRAO's proposal for the U.S. share of ALMA operations reviewed by a panel whose membership will partially overlap with the Board's panel. Successful outcomes are much to be desired by Canadians looking forward to using ALMA.

1.3 ALMA Science Meetings

The second world-wide meeting on "Science with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array" was held in Madrid, Spain, on 13-16 November 2006. With approximately 300 attendees, the conference covered a wide range of topics, including 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 now contains many of the invited and contributed oral talks, as well as some of the posters and is available at

http://www.oan.es/alma2006/

Figure 1: Canadian attendees at the ALMA meeting in Madrid, Spain. Picture courtesy Jim Hesser.

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 visit the web page at

http://www.cv.nrao.edu/naasc/disk07/

2 ALMA Science Advisory Committee

The ASAC met September 16-17, 2006 in Florence, Italy. The ASAC had 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. The ASAC also heard an update on progress with scientific software for ALMA (the observing tool, the pipeline, the offline data reduction system, and the archive). I summarize the main recommendations from the report below. The full report is available at

http://www.alma.nrao.edu/committees/ASAC/asacreport_2006sept.pdf

The ASAC supported the proposal to extend the schedule for Commissioning and Science Verification (CSV) and the consequent later start for "Early Science" with ALMA. The committee felt that starting formal "Early Science" in 2010 was acceptable given the time needed to commission the array, the plan for community participation in ALMA Science Verification projects, and the more powerful array that would be available by 2010 (at least 15 antennas and 4 receiver bands). The ASAC highlighted the need for a diligent and continuous effort to identify and recruit the best staff for the CSV team and to identify incentives to attract and retain such staff. The ASAC also recommended that ALMA consider creating a sabbatical visitor program to assist the Project Scientist to continue commissioning once Early Science begins and the array grows beyond 15 antennas.

Individual ASAC members reviewed each of the components of the Calibration Plan and provided detailed feedback to the team. Regarding observing modes, the ASAC recommended that the Project Scientist and the Science IPT should develop a more detailed list of observing modes. The ASAC would like to review these modes once the work is more advanced. Regarding science software, the ASAC recommended strongly that the release schedule for CASA (formerly known as AIPS++) be constantly scrutinized to ensure it meets the requirements of ALMA for early community testing and Early Science observations with ALMA. The ASAC also recommended that external users (in addition to NRAO users) be involved in CASA beta testing, with the goal of having the software available to a broad community before the start of Early Science.

In other ASAC news, Chris Wilson has ended her second term on the ASAC. The new Canadian ASAC member is Doug Johnstone from HIA. Chris will continue as Canadian ALMA project scientist and to be involved in ALMA software development as well as Canadian and North American community issues.

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. Within Canada, the main area of concern continues to be the (now urgent) need to obtain the second half of the LRP funding via the Mid-Term Review process. The money allocated for the first five years of the Long Range Plan will run out in 2007. In addition, money is needed for early ALMA operations; this money is both required by the international ALMA project and critical to ensure that high quality scientific support for Canadians will be available during Early Science in 2010. ALMA cannot afford to be taken for granted or viewed as a "done deal"; we have both construction and operations commitments that need additional funding if they are to be met.

The committee also felt that the current focus of the ALMA project on operations issues means that negotiations with NSF/NRAO for Canadian contributions to operations must get underway very soon. The items that have been identified as possible operations contributions for Canada (Band 3 maintenance; scientific support; science archive development; software development) are all sensible options to explore. It is a high priority to have Canadian support astronomers. They should be hired or identified early so that they will be ready to support the community during science verification and early science.

The committee felt that the Band 3 construction work is going very well. It is very good to see that the receivers are meeting (and in many cases exceeding) the strict ALMA specifications. It is also good to hear that the documentation (statement of work, interface control documents, etc.) is close to completion. The work that the team has done automating key aspects of the testing process should pay off as they move into full production. The hybrid plan for production that was presented (with some steps being done in industry and some done in-house at HIA) seems like a reasonable plan.

The committee also had an extensive discussion of the three charges that had been sent by the ALMA Board to the ALMA Science Advisory Committee, in particular the draft Commissioning and Science Verification Plan. The committee consensus was that starting formal "Early Science" in 2010 was acceptable given the need to commission the array, the plan for community participation in ALMA Science Verification projects, and the more powerful array that would be available by 2010 (at least 15 antennas and 4 receiver bands). In considering the charge on observing modes, the committee had an extensive discussion of the single dish observing modes for ALMA. There will be some effort to feed back the Canadian experience with continuum observing modes on the JCMT into the ALMA planning in this area.

Finally, the committee had a number of suggestions for improving outreach on ALMA issues to the Canadian astronomical community. The CASCA email exploder should be used more to distribute information on timely ALMA issues and opportunities. One such example is the opportunity to participate in the update to the Design Reference Science Plan. The Canadian ALMA web page should be moved to McMaster University under the control of the project scientist and the information and links there updated and consolidated. The recent graduate student workshop in Victoria was a big success that should be repeated in 2008 or 2009 as we get closer to Early Science and to reach a new generation of students, postdocs (and faculty). The committee also discussed the possibility of holding a focused ALMA science workshop somewhere in Canada, similar to the ones that have been held and are being planned in Europe and at NRAO.

3.2 Band 3 Receiver Development

The Band 3 Receiver Development Team continues to impress the ALMA Project. The preliminary in-house acceptance of the first cartridge to be shipped brought many accolades from the external reviews and, during recent trips to both Charlottesville and Madrid, the work of the Band 3 team was highly praised. The team is now preparing for the production phase which will start in a year and during which time one cartridge per month will be delivered to the ALMA Project! To be prepared for this tight schedule, the project is undergoing detailed production planning, contract preparation for outsourced packages, and the complete automation of the test sets. As well, the extremely important Critical Design Review is scheduled for the end of March 2007.

The first delivered Band 3 Cartridge has been tested together with the Band 6 cartridge at the Front End Integration Center in Charlottesville, hosted by the NRAO. Measured noise is in agreement with that determined at HIA. The Band 3 cartridge has already been used to check for radio frequency interference (RFI) between the two receivers and some leakage by the LO system of Band 6 was detected by the Band 3. Shielding of the room temperature components will resolve this problem. The acceptance review of the second Band 3 cartridge is scheduled for mid-December 2006.

Beyond the baseline ALMA project, the Band 3 team is in negotiations to build the Band 3 receivers for the sixteen additional antennas being built by Japan for the ALMA Compact Array. Other receiver contracts are being considered as well. It seems that the great news about the Band 3 receiver and instrument team is spreading throughout the millimetre radio astronomy community.

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

In the CADC, Norman Hill began work in late September on the requirements gathering phase of the design and implementation of the Request Handler component of the ALMA Archive system. A preliminary project plan was submitted to the project team and was reviewed at a meeting during the ADASS conference in Tucson in October. The first version of the requirements document was submitted to the Archive team in November and is waiting a review response. Work has begun on the design.

Shannon Jaeger, Gary Li's replacement, has settled in to her new role at Calgary as an ALMA Offline Software Developer. At the moment she is working on MSPLOT enhancements. The MSPLOT tool is one of the packages most visible to end-users of the off-line system. Making MSPLOT astronomer-friendly will occupy most of her time for the next couple of months.

Arne Grimstrup has been hired to replace David Fugate working on the ALMA Common Software system. Arne currently works as a software developer at the Subaru Telescope and arrives at the University of Calgary on December 18 to join the Canadian ALMA Software team. In early January he will leave for a two-month visit at ESO in Munich, where he will undergo training in the ALMA Common Software system and be integrated into the international ACS development group.

Raymond Rusk continues to work on the atmosphere, quanta, measures, coordsys, and image tools mentioned in previous reports. Each of these new casapy tools already provides a significant portion of the functionality present in the old Glish-based tools. There are a number of work objectives necessary for completion of each tool including writing a new C++ interface to the CASA library, migrating the Glish test code into Python, and extensive documentation updates. In October, Raymond Rusk and Shannon traveled to the ADASS meeting in Tucson, Arizona, followed by a trip to the Array Operation Center in Socorro, NM.

Aside from his work on ALMA software, Raymond also presented a well-attended ALMA talk for the annual DRAO Open House on September 23, with video links to Victoria and Calgary.

Another ALMA offline software test is scheduled for March 2007. Raymond will be in Socorro to work with the NRAO team during the test period. Lewis Knee will also be present as one of the testers, acting as the Canadian North American ALMA Science Center representative. The fourth ALMA Pipeline User Test is now planned to begin in January 2007. James di Francesco from HIA will be one of seven testers who will examine the output from automatic flagging, calibration, and imaging of the scientific target and calibrators. This will be the first Pipeline test to process the data from the scientific target, in some sense our first end-to-end test. Chris Wilson has been helping the development team prepare for the test by examining results from the development data sets carefully and by editing and updating the documentation.

Chris Wilson wilson@physics.mcmaster.ca

Canadian ALMA Project Scientist

(with input from Séverin Gaudet, Jim Hesser, Doug Johnstone, Raymond Rusk, and Russ Taylor)