ALMA Update

1  Recent news

1.1  Construction Progress

On March 2, 2007, ALMA reached a major milestone with the observation of first fringes on an astronomical source at the ALMA Test Facility at the VLA site in New Mexico. Achieving fringes on Saturn represents the first complete end-to-end test of the hardware and software of ALMA and requires the integration of state-of-the-art components from the telescopes on down the electronic chain.
Figure 1: first fringes on an astronomical source (Saturn) with the ALMA Test Facility.
The remaining Key Staff of the Joint ALMA Office (JAO) have now been appointed: Prof. Richard Hills as the ALMA Project Scientist, and Dr. Alison Peck as the Deputy Project Scientist. Richard Hills is Professor of Radio Astronomy, and a member of the Astrophysics Group, in the Physics Department of Cambridge University, UK. His work is well known to all who are in the field of millimeter and sub-millimeter-wave astronomy. Among the many topics that he has worked on with great distinction, Prof. Hills is especially well known as an expert in radio astronomical instrumentation, telescopes, and interferometry. Dr. Alison Peck is a staff member of the Submillimeter Array (SMA) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA. Dr. Peck is responsible for all science and observer scheduling at the SMA telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, HI. As such, her responsibilities range from designing and implementing a system of dynamic scheduling, optimizing data taking, and reduction procedures to outreach activities. We look forward to their leadership in, among other matters, the science commissioning and science verification of ALMA.
In Chile, work continues at the high site to finish the building at the Array Operations Site, which is now powered by a temporary generator. The Operations Support Facility (OSF) is now under a roof and work continues on the VertexRSI Site Erection Facility. Production antennas will be assembled here beginning in the second quarter of 2007. There are currently close to 400 people working at the ALMA site.
At the North American Front End Integration Center (FEIC) in Charlottesville, Virginia, the first cartridges for Bands 3 (3mm), 6 (1mm), 7 (.85mm), and 9 (.65mm) are installed in the cryostat and the warm cartridge amplifiers are now attached; any two cartidges may be operated simultaneously. ElectroMagnetic compatibility tests of LO driver interference with Band 3 were completed. In Hawaii, the remaining tests with the prototype water vapor radiometers on the SMA have been completed and the radiometers will be returning soon to Europe.

1.2  ALMA Operations

The next version of the ALMA Operations Plan has been completed and was the subject of an intense review by a panel of international experts commissioned by the ALMA Board. The review panel included Andy Woodsworth (former HIA astronomer, Director General of NRC's Institute of Information Technology, and Vice President, recently retired). The oral report by Chair Pierre Cox was quite positive; the Board will receive and consider the written report at its 26-27 March 2007 meeting in Tokyo.
In parallel to the international review, the NSF organized a similarly intense review of the proposal submitted by NRAO/AUI for NSF operations funding. The review committee was chaired by Jean-Rene Roy (Gemini) and Ernie Seaquist (U. Toronto) was a member. The outcome of this review will have an impact for Canada, as our astronomers receive direct support from the North American ALMA Regional Center located at NRAO. There has been no official communication as to the results of the review yet, but it is known that the oral report was also quite positive.

1.3  ALMA Science Meetings

In Canada, we are developing preliminary plans for an ALMA workshop in Calgary in the summer of 2008, probably after the CASCA meeting in Victoria. This workshop would follow on the very successful workshop on Submillimeter Observing Techniques held in Victoria in August, 2006. The 2008 workshop would focus more closely on ALMA and will provide an opportunity to introduce ALMA software to the Canadian community and also to begin to prepare the community for first science with ALMA.
There will be an ALMA information session, probably in a lunch period, at the CASCA meeting at RMC in June 2006.
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/
The ANASAC is beginning to discuss possible topics for scientific workshops in 2008. If anyone has any suggestions for future workshop topics, please pass them on to Doug Johnstone or Chris Wilson, who are the two Canadian members of the ANASAC.

1.4  Science Software Testing

Many aspects of the ALMA Science Software have undergone major tests in the last three months, specifically the Observing Tool, the Pipeline, and the Offline systems.
In mid-February, the ALMA Observing Tool, which will incorporate the "Phase I" (proposal) and "Phase II" (observing setup) tools, underwent its fourth user test. Lewis Knee (HIA) participated in this test. The main focus was to test the Phase II software to be used by non-expert users and to test a new interface to the expert mode developed since the third user test. In the non-expert mode, it is possible to set up simple single field interferometry observations using simple correlator configurations. Expert mode allows more complex correlator setups as well as the ability to define multiple fields (i.e., mosaics). Future releases will add additional functionality to both the expert and non-expert modes.
In March, Raymond Rusk was in Socorro to help support the latest round of testing for CASA, the Common Astronomy Software Applications package, by external users prior to the September 2007 beta release of casapy. This CASA test received close external scrutiny from NRAO management. During the week, Fred Lo, director of NRAO, met with the CASA developers to discuss project requirements from the developer's perspective and to emphasize to the developers the importance of casapy's success to NRAO. He particularly emphasized the importance of communications between the CASA team in Socorro and his office in Charlottesville. He also met separately with both the NRAO internal testers and with the external testers.
Representatives from all three partners in the ALMA project (with Lewis Knee as the North American ALMA Science Center Canadian representative) participated in an intense week-long data reduction exercise. Based upon AIPS++, CASA has undergone an intense effort to develop functionality and a new user interface (based on Python with Java GUIs) in advance of a planned beta release this autumn. The testers used CASA to reduce data from a number of telescopes, including BIMA, DRAO, GBT, PdBI, and VLA. Basic functionality for interferometric data reduction seems to be in good shape with an adequate task-based user interface. Single-dish functionality has been added to CASA but the user interface still needs to be integrated into the rest of the package.
Finally, the ALMA Pipeline completed its fourth user test in March. The seven testers included James di Francesco (HIA) and Chris Wilson (McMaster) and included testers from all three ALMA partners. This was the first test to include end-to-end processing of the science target, including flagging, calibration, and imaging. The completed test report is expected to be available by about mid-April.

2  ALMA Science Advisory Committee

Doug Johnstone, the new Canadian ASAC member, will be traveling to Japan in early May for the next face-to-face meeting. The significant charges to the ASAC this time are: to review the status and capabilities of the ALMA Compact Array; review the science in the second version of the Design Reference Science Plan (updated to include the Compact Array); review the current status of molecular line databases; and discuss the operational plan for ALMA.

3  ALMA Developments in Canada

3.1  Band 3 Receiver Development

The last three months have been busy ones for the Band 3 Receiver Development Team. The preliminary in-house acceptance of the second cartridge to be shipped went extremely well, with the outside reviewers "fully satisfied" with the receiver. Delivery of the cartridge to the Front End Integration Centre in Charlottesville for integration into the receiver cryostat is expected soon. 
As mentioned in the last issue, the team is continuing to prepare for the production phase which will start in under a year and during which one cartridge per month will be delivered to the ALMA Project. To be prepared for this intensive schedule, the project continues to undergo detailed production planning, contract preparation for outsourced packages, and the complete automation of the test sets. Everything is proceeding very well and the extremely important Critical Design Review is scheduled for the end of March 2007.
In recognition of his work on the low-noise amplifiers crucial to the Band 3 project, Frank Jiang was presented an NRC Outstanding Achievement Award in January by Dr. Coulombe, President of NRC. 
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. Faced with a large body of Glish-base documentation for the image analysis module that must be rewritten for the casapy framework, Raymond Rusk spent some time considering the best way to change and to maintain the documentation in the future. Since the framework is still undergoing rapid changes, inclusion of "live" Python example code in the documentation seems a sensible solution. This code can be automatically extracted for periodic testing. With "live" Python examples illustrating the functionality of the image analysis and coordinate system tools, when underlying C++ code changes make an example obsolete this is soon revealed through periodic exercising of the live examples. Work on the examples has gone hand-in-hand with extensive modifications to the image analysis component to increase robustness. Many of the old Glish-based test scripts still need to be translated to Python. Raymond will continue to work on this over the next few months.
Shannon Jaeger continued work on the MSPlot tool and its higher level plotxy/flagxy interfaces to CASA. Several new plot options have been added, improving the functionality of the tool. In mid-February, she spent time in Socorro working closely with Urvashi Rao Venkata, Kumar Golap and Sanjay Bhatnagar. Later this month, Shannon and Urvashi will debut re-factored TablePlot and MSPlot tools.
Arne Grimstrup has been in Garching, Germany since early January 2007 working with the ALMA Common Software (ACS) group. He will return to Calgary in mid-March to continue his ACS work from there.
Chris Wilson wilson@physics.mcmaster.ca
Canadian ALMA Project Scientist
(with input from Jim Hesser, Doug Johnstone, Lewis Knee, and Raymond Rusk)


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On 22 Mar 2007, 07:50.