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Contact Information

• 2008-2-20 14:30 UT Please check your local time; it may have changed!
• Duration: 1 hr
• USA Toll Free Number: 877-874-1919
• Toll Number: +1-203-320-9891
• Passcode: 185064
• Leader: Al Wootten
• Attendees:

Topics

1. Old Business The enhanced Agenda from last meeting is available. Science IPT notes from last month's telecon are attached to the bottom of the agenda.

See other images and animations. See other images.

1. New Business--Project news/updates (Hills, Peck)
   • Board, ASAC News.
     • ASAC Charges for discussion 1-2 Feb 2008. See ASAC Agenda.
   • JAO, ARC news:
     • Jobs. Commissioning Scientist Santiago Positions now closed, ARC Positions NRAO closed.
   • Science IPT
     • Items covered below
   • Current ALMA System Block Diagram
   • ALMA Construction Picture Gallery
   • ALMA Safety Requirements
   • Photo gallery of construction events in Chile
   • Risk Register v7.0 Need to update to make current; our leaders are living in the past.
2. Current Science IPT Schedule. Current Operations Schedule. very high level summary Schematic IPS. (2007 Novemer 30 for all these except the high level schematic, which is current!)
3. Directories
   • Science IPT Directory Contributors to ALMA Science IPT (Sept06).
   • ALMA Directory ALMA Directory v3.0
   • ALMA Chile Directory.

Science IPT Group Activity Reports

Please include your Group Activity Report here (How to Enter Your Report), or email it to AlWootten

Project Scientists

1. Science IPT -
   • Change Control Board items, other technical concerns (Hills)
   • ATF: (Peck)
     • Summary
     • Goals: (1) Get software working (2) Training personnel and developing procedures
     • Spectral-line pointing needs to be available in Q1 2008 for single dish testing in Chile.
     • The current schedule is below. Please let Alison and Debra know if anyone has any issues with this. During the current period foci of interest include further understanding of the behavior of the Line Length Corrector, to measure the baseline correctly and to begin interferometric pointing.

2008
Week	Event
Feb 17	Peck, Brogan, Remijan
Feb 24	Peck, Remijan, Martin
Mar 2	Remijan, Reid, Nyman
Mar 9	Reid,

• OSF

2008
Week	Event
Feb 15	Emerson VxRSI antenna contractor handover testing begins 4 Feb

1. Next meeting is on March 19th (14:30 UT). April 16th for the following month.
2. Astronomer Outreach: ESO Newsletter New ESO Messenger with Antenna article, New ESO ALMA News New NRAO Newsletter appearing soon. NAOJ News. NRAO ALMA Calendar

Emerson/Laing/Vila-Vilaro -- Instrument Scientists

• PSI at the ATF: Schedule above; see report in attachments.

Richard Hills, Alison Peck, Robert Laing -- Commissioning and Science Verification

• Commissioning and Science Verification
  • Plan.

Holdaway, Conway -- Configuration Group

• Holdaway's description of the development of the design for the extended ALMA configurations, rev 2 for edm.
• Eduardo Donoso and Simon Radford determined the separation between the planned ALMA antenna station A104 and the existing CBI generator plant is about 50 m. Tony Readhead and Radford agree this separation should be adequate for CBI operations and maintenance.
• Array layout on the high site; weather station locations have orange dots. PDF. The Technical specifications and SOW for the IFB for the AOS Road network design have been completed. A design for road and fiber network at the high site is to be bid for construction shortly. Design of the extended array is complete; bids for antenna pad construction are out.
• Final configuration design. We continue to assess performance (see imaging, below). We continue to assess configuration performance.
• New <4km Configuration approved Passed CCB.
• Proposed ACA Configuration approved.
• ArrayCenter shows photos of the region of the center of the Array.

Steve Myers/Rob Reid (Mark Holdaway)-- Imaging

• CASA Simulator Report
  • The Library of standard ALMA images for simulation is available.
  • Fidelities over 10⁴ have been achieved for 4 hour noiseless "observations" of the M31 HII region, using deep cleans with a tightly constrained support region. uv fidelities for a set of ALMA configurations. The input model was scaled to match the resolution of each configuration, so to first order the curves should be horizontally shifted copies of each other. The upward trend with increasing configuration number is probably due to clean's primary beam correction neglecting blockage by the subreflector, which can be easily fixed.
  • Dirty beam images have been made for all of the ALMA configurations, for both snapshots and 4h exposures at a variety of declinations.
  • CASA simulation wiki with examples
  • Bojan Nikolic is using the simulator to make u-v data and maps when investigating the effects of atmospheric phase and, in the future for trying out phase-correction techniques.
• Pointing selfcalibration for mosaics

Jeff Mangum -- Calibration

• Response to ASAC comments
• Pointing Design document now drafted.
• Calibration Plan: Current version of the calibration plan and associated documents ("examples", "roadmaps", "matrices", etc.) posted. Comments welcome.
• Calibration Examples: The "meat" of the Calibration Plan. Review of these documents nearly complete, some need updates.
• Ancillary Calibration Devices: Documents which describe the weather station and temperature profile technical specifications have been developed. Initial purchase documentation for (P,T,RH,Ws,Wdir) measurement devices has been made by Leonardo.

Robert Lucas -- SSR

• Latest SSR meeting (2007-12-12).
• Regular testing of subsystems and integrated system at the ATF.(see SSR link above)

Michiel Hogerheijde -- DRSP

• While I work on including the author responses to the referee comments, the DRSP 2.0 web site continues to be password protected. If you would like access (keeping in mind that the author responses have not been added yet) use: username=review and password=chajnantor! (including the exclamation mark).

L.-A. Nyman -- Site Characterization

• Oxygen thermal profiler
  • Radiosonde launches needed to 'teach' profiler
  • Draft Memo on Sonde launches
• OSF Weather Station link.

Remijan, Markwick-Kemper -- ALMA Working Group on Spectral Line Frequencies

• ALMA White Paper on Lab Astrophysics was sent to Al and Andrew on Dec 1, 2007 - Click for a COPY . It includes a summary of:
  • NASA Laboratory Astrophysics Workshop White Paper
  • Workshop on Submillimeter and Far-Infrared Laboratory Spectroscopy in Support of Herschel, SOFIA, and ALMA Report
• Splatalogue.net is still the home for Splatalogue but see below for the test version we are working on here at NRAO.
• A new "face" for Splatalogue including new search features can be found at Splatalogue. Please send comments on the form and functionality displayed. NOTE: while the functionality may be displayed, it may NOT be active yet!
• We are still expecting a "beta" release of many of the new functionality, as well as some new surprises, by Jan 2008.

Science Corner:

• Recent ALMA Talk by A. BakerMapping Star and Galaxy Formation with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array
• Recent ALMA Talk by A. Wootten ALMA: Moving Beyond First Fringes to Transformational Science.

Calendar

Official JAO Calendar

ALMA Events of Interest

(see also Al's ALMA Biweekly Calendar)

2007
Day	Date	Time	Event	location	details
	Jan 15		ESAC face-to-face meeting	Garching
	Jan 18		ANASAC telecon	---
	Jan 23-24		Nutator CDR	ASIAA
	Feb 1-2		ASAC face-to-face	Santiago
	Feb 7-8		WVR CDR

Upcoming Meetings

[[http://www.astro.caltech.edu/USNC-URSI-J/Boulder%202008%20presentations/Boulde%202008%20commission%20J%20sessions.htm ][North American URSI]] meeting Jan 3-6 2008, Boulder Presentations

AAS meeting Jan 7-11 2008, Austin, Tx (NRAO/ALMA booth)

IAU Symposium 251 Organic Matter in Space Feb 18-22, Hong Kong

The Cosmic Agitator - Magnetic Fields in the Galaxy 2008 March 26-29 Lexington.

29th URSI General AssemblyChicago, Illinois, USA, 9-16 August 2008. Abstracts due 2008 Jan 31

See also NAASC listing

-- AlWootten - 12 Jan 2008