ALMA Update

1 Recent news

1.1 Construction Progress

The first of two ALMA transporters has been completed and passed its initial operational tests. The 130-ton machine moves on 28 wheels and will be able to transport a 115-ton antenna and set it down on a concrete pad within millimeters of a prescribed position. The first vehicle will arrive at the Operations Support Facility in late 2007.

Figure 1: The first ALMA transporter. The vehicle is 20 m long!

There are currently four 12 m antennas under assembly and testing at the Operations Support Facility (OSF). The manufacture of three 12 m antennas for the Atacama Compact Array was been completed in Japan and the antennas were disassambled and shipped to Chile. They arrived at the OSF on July 22; re-assembly and adjustment of the three antennas in Chile is expected to be completed this month.

Figure 2: Panel tiers 2, 3 and 4 are mounted on the Vertex antenna at the OSF (image from August 31).

Design and engineering of the antenna station layout, interconnecting road system, and power and LO distribution by M3 Engineering is nearing completion. The second front end assembly (SN01) is nearly complete and some functionality has been tested. Acceptance testing of the sixth B3 (3mm) receiver cartridge has begun. At present, noise temperature and image rejection measurements for the first ALMA Front End are in progress. Assembly and testing of the second ALMA holography transmitter, receiver, and positioner are in progress.

Figure 3: The first 12 m antenna from Japan awaits photogrammetry (as seen September 3).

In software news, the off-line development work in Canada and elsewhere will be impacted by the recent announcement by Joe McMullin, the ALMA Offline Team Leader and CASA lead, that he is taking the ALMA Systems Integration Leader position in Chile. Joe's appointment in Chile starts in late October after the Beta release of CASA. Joe McMullin has been very effective during his period managing the Offline and CASA software development groups. NRAO is currently advertising for a new Head of Interferometry Data Analysis, to refill Joe's position. The status of Division Head, which will now be associated with the position, reflects the importance NRAO places on CASA for the future operation of the EVLA and ALMA.

1.2 Committees and Reviews

On 1 September, Tim de Zeeuw became the new ESO Director General, succeeding Catherine Cesarsky. He also becomes a member of the ALMA Board. Dr. de Zeeuw sees completing ALMA on budget and on time as one of the three main goals for ESO in the coming years (along with getting the best possible science from the VLT and designing an ELT with > 40 m diameter).

At its meeting in Santiago 27-28 June, the ALMA Board welcomed the two new members from East Asia: Dr. P. T. P. Ho (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Taiwan) and Dr. H. Kobayashi (Director of the VERA project, Japan).

Jim Hesser observed the first Director's Review of the ALMA project which occurred 10-12 Sept. in Santiago. The eight-member panel [Douglas Bock (CARMA), Genevieve Debouzy (CNES), Roy Booth (HRAO), Nobuyoshi Fugono (ATR), Toshinori Maihara (Kyoto University), Jim Oschmann (Ball Aerospace) (Chair), Remo Tilanus (JCMT), Carol Wilkinson (Caltech)] was empowered by the Board and agencies to review all aspects of ALMA construction and plans for operations; it is expected that this will become an annual process with slowly rotating committee membership. All integrated product teams reported in detail the status of their activities, based upon accumulated documentation exceeding 3,000 pages. At the conclusion, the panel orally reported that ALMA's progress has been impressive with many risks retired; the teams are working well together; the costs appear to be well understood, being tracked carefully and under control; and risk management is being actively and effectively pursued. Their written report will provide suggestions for further steps to ensure successful completion to construction.

2 ALMA Meetings

2.1 ALMA Science Advisory Committee (ASAC)

Doug Johnstone continues to represent Canada on the ALMA Science Advisory Committee (ASAC). At present, the ASAC is considering two charges from the ALMA Board, with a third important charge deferred until the Spring. The charges being assessed are (1) the prioritization of the correlator modes required for Early Science and (2) a review of the calibration plan, specifically the scientific aspects of Assembly, Integration, and Verification Commissioning. The deferred charge refers to the status of the ALMA real time, observing, and off-line software for Early Science.

Neither of the charges being considered for the October 30-31st Board meeting are controversial and thus the ASAC has conducted discussions on these topics by phone rather than arranging an expensive and time-consuming face-to-face meeting this quarter. The ALMA correlator is extremely powerful, allowing for simultaneous high resolution measurements of particular molecular lines while at the same time measuring broad band continuum. With this flexibility, however, comes complexity and thus there is a need to order the various modes in terms of priority during commissioning, and especially with respect to the needs of ALMA during Early Science. Likewise, ALMA is intended to be a precision telescope and thus precise calibration is very important. Since many ASAC members are experts in the field of interferometry, their insight is extremely helpful in consideration of the calibration plan.

The ASAC has also received a response from the ALMA Board to its recommendations from May, which are now available at

 
http://www.alma.nrao.edu/committees/ASAC/asacreport_2007may.pdf

For the most part, the Board accepts and agrees with the ASAC comments on both the DRSP 2.0 and the integration into ALMA of the Atacama Compact Array. The third charge, on the current status of molecular line databases, while generating much support from the Board, also received a lukewarm response to the suggestion that ALMA development funds might be available for such research. The Board preferred instead to support the ASAC suggestion that the members of the ALMA Board promote these interdisciplinary activities with national/international funding agencies."

2.2 ALMA North American Science Advisory Committee (ANASAC)

The ANASAC met at the North American ALMA Science Center on 17 August. The meeting focused on four charges from NRAO: Users Grants program; terms of reference for the ANASAC; Science workshop for 2008; and ANASAC membership. The committee also discussed the current charges being considered by the ASAC (see previous section). Most of the discussion focused on the issue of an ALMA User Grants program, which is of limited interest to Canadian users of ALMA; the remaining charges were uncontroversial. The full report is available at

http://www.cv.nrao.edu/naasc/docs/anasac_f2f2007_report.txt

With this meeting, Chris Wilson rotated off the ANASAC; her replacement should be known by the next newsletter update.

2.3 Canadian ALMA Science Advisory Committee (CASAC)

The Canadian ALMA Science Advisory Committee met at Queen's University June 3-4, 2007. Current committee members are Stephane Courteau, James Di Francesco, Mike Fich, Doug Johnstone, Douglas Scott, Chris Wilson, and T. Webb. The main focus of the meeting was to discuss various options for ALMA operations, outreach to the Canadian community, and the recent meeting of the ASAC.

There is an ongoing and now extremely urgent need to identify Canadian funding for the next five years of ALMA construction. This statement will not be a surprise to any astronomer who has been following the efforts to obtain funding for the second half of the Long Range Plan. In addition to the money needed to complete our commitments to the Band 3 receivers, money is also needed for the early years of ALMA operations.

The committee recommends that Canada be an integral part of ALMA operations, since playing an active role in day-to-day operations brings benefits to the broader Canadian ALMA user community. The committee feels that it is important to move aggressively to define Canada's role in ALMA Operations in discussions with our American partners. The committee also supports the proposal by the University of Calgary (see last section) to investigate options for additional software and advanced user support activities (this is currently outside the "core" ALMA operations support). The committee would also encourage and support other Canadian groups who were interested in seeking funds for non-core activities.

In terms of user outreach, the committee recommends that the current (non-HIA) Canadian ALMA web site be moved to the Project Scientist's institution and maintained to be current and timely. The committee also had extensive discussions of the upcoming ALMA software meeting at the University of Calgary (see next section).

2.4 Upcoming Science Meetings

In Canada, we are organizing an ALMA workshop to be held in Calgary May 26-27, 2008 (after the CASCA meeting in Victoria). The title of the meeting is "Observing with ALMA" and the focus will be on the science to be done with ALMA and on becoming familiar with the software tools that ALMA PIs will need to use. The workshop is limited to 50 people, and the first 20 students to register will get substantial travel support. Registration opens in January 2007, but I encourage you to sign up to the email list as soon as possible if you are interested in this meeting. More information is available at

http://www.phas.ucalgary.ca/alma

ESO is organizing a workshop on "Gas and Stars in Galaxies: A Multi-Wavelength 3D Perspective" to be held June 10-13, 2008 in Garching, Germany. This conference aims to bring together the optical/near-IR and submillimetre/radio communities working on 3-dimensional extragalactic data. The aim is to have a mainly science-driven conference, centered on both gas and stars in and around galaxies in all stages of their evolution. The conference web page is

http://www.eso.org/gal3D2008

The ANASAC is still discussing possible topics for scientific workshops in 2008. If anyone has any suggestions for future workshop topics, please pass them on to Doug Johnstone, who is the one continuing Canadian member of the ANASAC.

3 ALMA Developments in Canada

3.1 Band 3 Receiver Development

The Band 3 Receiver Development Team will be holding the Critical Design Review (CDR) at the end of September, after which the final design of the receivers will be fixed for the production phase. This major review has been the focus of the team throughout the summer and over a thousand pages of documentation have been produced. We wish the team well during the evaluation.

Despite the work necessary to prepare for the CDR, another cartridge (the fourth) has been shipped to the Front End Integration Centre in Charlottesville. The first two cartridges in Charlottesville have been installed in Front End Assemblies (which house all the cartridge bands together) and tests are underway to make sure the integration of the various components is successful.

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).

3.2 Software

Software development work in Canada continues at HIA and the University of Calgary. The Canadian software development contribution to ALMA is funded primarily by a grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation. This grant formally ends in July 2008. However, CASA and ACS development will not be completed. It is important to have fairly complete functionality in time for early ALMA Science. There will be funding remaining in the CFI award at the end of the official term, and the team in Calgary and HIA are developing a plan to extend the software development work beyond July 2008. Russ Taylor has held recent discussions with Brian Glendenning at NRAO concerning the nature of the work to be done post 2008 and the Canadian contribution.

Raymond Rusk at DRAO and Shannon Jeager in Calgary continue their work on the ALMA off-line system software within CASA. Raymond is developing the images module, which includes the image tool used to create, manipulate and analyze images, and the coordsys tool to manipulate coordinate systems. All coordsys and image tool methods have now been implemented and tested within the new casapy framework and the module and tool level documentation has been updated. Raymond also has primary responsibility for the quanta and measures modules that provide functionality for conversion and calculation of quantities (values with units) and reference frames. The quanta and measures module and toolkit documentation is now fully updated for CASA.

Raymond also worked on the visibility lister. He has provided a skeleton casapy interface for the deconvolver tool used to deconvolve a known point spread function from an image, and a skeleton casapy interface for the vpmanager (voltage pattern manager) tool needed to describe a telescopes voltage pattern or primary beam. Finally, while visiting Socorro, Raymond completed work on the Atmospheric Transmission Model (ATM) module, which has now been integrated into the standard CASA distribution. The tool is now ready for the beta release of CASA.

Shannon is working on MSPlot, a tool for plotting, displaying, listing and editing Measurement Set data. Her main activities in the last months include implementing new functionality for scalar and vector averaging of spectral channels, scalar averaging over time, plus a variety of extensions to the plotting tool, from labelling to pretty MS summary output, to supporting new plots (e.g., plotting weights).

With the recent departure of Urvashi Venkata from the CASA group, Shannon has now taken on responsibility for TablePlot, which is a plotting tool for general CASA tables. She has also taken increased responsibility for the lower-level plotxy tool, and will begin to work on interactive image fitting and automated source detection and estimation. Recently, Shannon presented a CASA demo of the off-line system to the University of Calgary astronomy group. Later this month she travels to London, UK to attend ADASS 2007 where she will present a poster on behalf of the CASA group.

Arne Grimstrup continues his work in Calgary on the development, maintenance and support of ACS and its users. Over the summer, Arne worked with the CASA and other ALMA subsystem teams to integrate CASA with the ACS software. During the course of the integration, he assisted the ALMA Pipeline team in diagnosing build problems arising from different versions of a Python module being used in both CASA and ACS. Arne also has provided support to the Control software team, who were seeing conflicts between their Control and Control Common Python modules.Arne discovered that the conflict was due to a combination of user level usage, Python import behaviour, and OmniORB code generation practice, and fixed the problem. He also provided support for the release of ACS version 6.0.4 by investigating and fixing software and test errors.

ACS 7.0 will be released in the fall. As part of the development, Arne has been coordinating the update of the Python interpreter and libraries to more recent versions with the other software teams. He has also worked on several critical problems that have severely impacted operations at the ATF and developed fixes that will ship in the next release. Presently, he is reworking the Alarm System configuration to improve usability and maintainability.

At HIA, work on the Request Handler component of the ALMA Archive system led by Norman Hill and supported by Dustin Jenkins has been proceeding well. The Request Handler will provide both a graphical user interface and a programmatic interface to the Archive system to allow users to access data stored in the archives and/or to initiate processing to generate data for retrieval. It will support access to public data by any user, and access to proprietary data limited to authorized users. It will also support synchronous and asynchronous (staged) data access. The design documents and the technology evaluation report were released for review in May. The final versions of these documents were released in June. Development of a prototype was completed and delivered to ESO in July. Norman Hill was at ESO in Garching August 6-10 where he met with the Archive team, interfaced the Request Handler prototype to the ALMA UI environment, gave a talk and demo on the Request Handler design, and discussed the development plan of the full Request Handler with the Archive lead, Andreas Wicenec. Work on the Request Handler is scheduled to resume in October.

Chris Wilson wilson@physics.mcmaster.ca

Canadian ALMA Project Scientist

(with input from Russ Taylor, Severin Gaudet, Doug Johnstone, and Jim Hesser, as well as material from Al Wootten)

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On 22 Sep 2007, 13:49.