ALMA Update

1  Recent news

1.1  Construction Progress

There are currently 11 antennas at the Operations Support Facility (OSF, 3000 m). The 4 Melco antennas are undergoing tests; 2 Vertex antennas are undergoing pointing trials, 4 additional Vertex antennas are in the construction building, and 1 Vertex antennas is "in arrival". In Europe, the first AEM antenna is assembled in Spain and undergoing tests.
The test results from the antennas so far look very promising. All sky pointing using the prototype optical pointing telescope is achieving 1.4˘˘ (radial rms). Holography results suggest that the surface specification of 25 mm is achievable. Acceptance of the first antenna (Melco No. 2) is imminent; after acceptance from the contractors, the antenna will be moved back to the Technical Building for more tests.
At the Array Operations Site (AOS, 5000 m) the main activity is the construction of the first of the 200 antenna stations and their accompanying roads and electrical fibers. The schedule involves building about 30% of the antenna stations per year.

Software testing is continuing at the ALMA Test Facility (ATF) at the VLA site in New Mexico. The ATF is now doing routine interferometry. Recent successes include planet tracking and a set of quite uniform calibrator flux measurements. The ATF is now expected to remain in operation until the end of 2008.
Figure 1: One of the two ALMA transporters with two of the antennas currently at the Operations Support Facility.
Figure 2: One of the first ALMA antenna pads at the Array Operations Site. Another pad undergoing "curing" protected from the elements to provide a more stable thermal environment.
Figure 3: Another major activity at the AOS is the grading of the central antenna cluster.

 

1.2  Personnel news

On September 8, the ALMA Board was pleased to announce that Dr. Thijs de Graauw of the Netherlands has been appointed Director of ALMA. Dr. de Graauw's appointment follows a search by an international committee. He is a world expert in infrared and sub-millimetre astronomy with considerable experience in coordinating and leading large international scientific projects. Most recently, he has been the Principal Investigator of the HIFI instrument for the Herschel Space Observatory, which is scheduled for launch in 2009.
On September 15, the ALMA Director announced that Dr. Richard Kurz has been appointed Project Manager of ALMA. Dr. Kurz has extensive management experience in space and astronomical projects. He has also been involved in ALMA management since 1999, most recently serving as Interim European Project Manager since February 2008.
The ALMA Director also announced that Dr. Tetsuo Hasegawa has been appointed Deputy Project Manager of ALMA. Dr. Hasegawa has considerable experience in management of astronomical projects, as well as a distinguished academic career. He has been serving as ALMA Interim Project Manager since May 2008. Before coming to Chile, Dr. Hasegawa was ALMA Project Director and Project Manager at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

2  ALMA Meetings

2.1  ALMA Science Advisory Committee (ASAC)

Doug Johnstone continues to represent Canada on the ALMA Science Advisory Committee (ASAC). Throughout 2008, the ASAC has kept regular telecons, leading to its autumn face-to-face meeting in Charlottesville, VA, home of the North American ALMA Regional Center, at the end of September. The ASAC has been charged by the ALMA Board to carefully review and assess the readiness of the ALMA software and the detailing of software requirements for Early Science, which is only two years away! As well, the ASAC continues to monitor ALMA commissioning and science verification as well as the status of the regional ALMA Centers.
The ALMA Board has also charged the ASAC to help draw up a long-term ALMA Development Plan in consultation with the international astronomy community. The plan should set out the scientific context for transformational science with ALMA in the next two decades, in the era of, for example, JWST, ELTs and SKA, and recommend developments necessary to achieve this vision. The ALMA Board views this plan as having a high strategic priority, and is coordinating its development across the entire ALMA partnership.  Look for more details to emerge over the next few months or contact Doug Johnstone (ASAC) or Chris Wilson (Development Plan Working Group) with suggestions and comments.
2009 is the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) and the ALMA Project aims to play a role in engaging the public during this high-profile event. The ASAC will spend time during the autumn face-to-face examining the IYA activities planned for both the general public and the astronomical community.

2.2   ALMA North American Science Advisory Committee (ANASAC)

Doug Johnstone attended the ALMA North American Science Advisory Committee (ANASAC) meeting in Charlottesville Virginia in mid-September.  The ANASAC plays a dual role, informing NRAO of the wishes and concerns of the North American astronomical community and receiving charges from NRAO.  As well, the ANASAC considers the larger ALMA Science Advisory Committee (ASAC) charges from the ALMA Board and acts as support for the North American ASAC members, especially when there are issues that may be of particular interest to the North American community.
At the most recent meeting, the ANASAC considered three issues in detail.
  1.  How North America should respond to the ALMA Development Plan. With the US Decadal Report starting up, it is extremely important that the future of ALMA and ALMA development  be advocated vigorously. The ANASAC has been charged to produce a brief on these issues for the Decadal Report.  

  2. What is needed for pre-ALMA science support. The ANASAC strongly endorsed a continuation of the interferometric summer schools run by NRAO and plans to produce graduate level courses on Radio Astronomy; see for example  
    http://www.cv.nrao.edu/course/astr534/
    There are also opportunities for graduate students to visit and learn directly from NRAO scientists in Charlottesville and Soccorro.


  3. What should be done with the Vertex test antenna.  At the end of the year the ALMA Test Facility at the VLA site (see previous e-Cass) will cease to exist and the two test antennas will need to be removed. The Europeans and North Americans are considering options for the utilization of these extremely accurate instruments. (In North America it is the Vertex antenna that is being considered.) Unfortunately they are not easily integrated into the existing ALMA array (significant changes have been made since the prototypes were built) and moving costs to Chile are prohibitive. All other options are on the table.

2.3  Upcoming Science Meetings

As the recent work on the ALMA Development plan indicates (see above), it is a good time to be considering new opportunities for ALMA instrumentation. One of the more obvious things to do for ALMA is to fill in the bands where receivers will not be fully available when the array is complete, namely Bands 1, 2 or 5. Of these, Band 1 is perhaps the most scientifically rich; it nominally extends from 31 GHz to 45 GHz. The Astronomy Technology Research Group in Victoria is organizing an ALMA Band 1 Science and Engineering workshop in Victoria on October 8-10, 2008. This workshop will include presentations on the Band 1 science case as well as discussion of potential engineering contributions from Canada, Chile and Taiwan. Interested participants should contact James Di Francesco at HIA for more details.
The North American ALMA Science Center is hosting its third annual science workshop in Charlottesville, Virginia September 25-27, 2008. The subject of this year's workshop is "The Birth and Feedback of Massive Stars, Within and Beyond the Galaxy", a timely theme, given the ability of ALMA's frequency coverage, sensitivity, and resolution to bridge the gap between Galactic and low-redshift extragalactic studies of star formation and feedback. More details about the program can be found at the workshop website 
http://www.cv.nrao.edu/naasc/massive08/
The next workshop will likely be in June 2009 on the subject of "Star Formation and AGN at Low and High Redshift". I should have more details on this workshop in my next report.

3  ALMA Developments in Canada

3.1  Band 3 Receiver Development

All eight pre-production Band 3 cartridges have now been completely assembled and fully tested. Six have been sent on to Front End Integration Centers while the remaining two are awaiting delivery. At present, the Band 3 team is actually ahead of the ALMA project with receiver production. Congratulations to the Band 3 team on a job well done.
The first four production cartridges have been assembled and two of these are now fully tested. An internal band 3 production workshop occurred in early September and defined the tasks and schedules for completion of the project. The delivery schedule, at peak, remains one cartridge every three weeks. In order to meet this tight schedule, a second cartridge test system is being built and will be functioning in about a year.

3.2  Software

Since the last report, there was a lot of focus on communication between the graphical image viewer (CASA viewer) and the CASA command- line interface (casapy). This is a critical issue to solve to allow users the ability to examine results and their images; however, it has been temporarily put on hold. Shannon Jeager's focus has shifted to cleaning up the existing image analysis tasks in CASA as well as implementing some of the fundamental missing parts of the image region selection from the command-line interface. This exercise has been fruitful in a couple of respects. The obvious one is increased functionality at the user's fingertips, but it has also forced Shannon to learn the underlying CASA-core software. Knowing the underlying software will be essential when Shannon moves in the near future to adding new image analysis algorithms.
ALMA Common Software development continues to be Arne Grimstup's primary focus. The ACS team released version 7.0.2 in July. Arne's contributions to this release include implementing a set common container startup messages that allow better management of ALMA operations, implementing a set of tests that characterize the fault- recovery behaviour of the containers, and updating some Python modules to more recent versions. In addition, Arne attended the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation and the SciPy, the annual Python in Science conferences. ACS-8.0 development is currently under way with release being planned for late October. In addition to the usual bug fixes and maintenance of the Python subsystem, Arne has been investigating the impact of proposed changes to the C++ exception handling and ways to allow Python clients and components to interact with the alarm subsystem.
Raymond Rusk, who has been seconded from NRC-HIA to the University of Calgary for the past five years, left the ALMA project at the end of August for a new life in the private sector in Victoria. The ALMA software team wishes Raymond the best in his new position and thanks him for his substantial contribution to the CASA software development since 2003. He will be missed. We are seeking a replacement CASA software developer for a one-year position ending October 2009. See the advertisement to appear soon in the job section of the CASCA web site.
Development is continuing on the ALMA Pipeline with the next large user test scheduled for early in 2009. This test will focus again on end-to-end reduction of single pointing interferometric data with improved calibration and imaging heuristics. This summer, Chris Wilson completed a regression test of the interferometric portion of the pipeline, which has undergone substantial structural changes since the last user test in 2007.
The second phase of the ALMA Request Handler (ARH) has been delivered to the ALMA archive group. This version of the ARH allows delivery of data on physical media and asynchronous processing of the data. The ALMA archive team will add the site-specific functionality to interface the ARH with the rest of the ALMA archive, after which the ARH will be deployed at the ATF and eventually at the OSF. The new ARH will also be included in the next round of ALMA Science Archive user tests, which will be developed over the next few months. A final development effort will begin as soon as resources allow. This effort will add some an operator interface, and add some minor functionality to the asynchronous processing.
Chris Wilson wilson@physics.mcmaster.ca
Canadian ALMA Project Scientist
(with input from James di Francesco, Severin Gaudet, Doug Johnstone, and Russ Taylor, as well as material from Al Wootten)


File translated from TEX by TTH, version 3.40.
On 23 Sep 2008, 07:14.