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Contact Information

  • 2007-5-16 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: Sheng-Yuan Liu, Nikolic, Emerson, Morita, C. Wilson, Vila-Vilaro, Peck, Mangum, Reid, Brogan, Indebetouw, Hales, Wootten, Hogerhiejde

Topics

  1. Old Business The enhanced Agenda from last meeting is available. Science IPT notes from last month's telecon are in the agenda in blue.

VertexRSI Pedestal Assembly at OSF The first production antenna is being assembled at the OSF Technical Facility! See other images and animations.

  1. New Business--Project news/updates (Wootten, Testi, Morita)
    • Welcome to Leonardo Testi in Garching as European ALMA Project Scientist!
    • ASAC agenda for meeting just completed.
    • CIPT CDR5 22-25 May, in Charlottesville. In addition to the usual CIPT internal review function, this year there are other functions--a review for NAOJ and a review for NSF. There is an external review panel chaired by Dick Crutcher. The Science IPT has been asked for: " a brief presentation from the NA Project Scientist with his perspective on the issues and risks. and "To clarify the second item, the panel was asking specifically about a 5-10 presentation from Al on the issues and risks as seen from the (Project) scientist perspective to provide further context. This should be squeezed into the Tuesday morning session." Comments?
    • 22 May: Discussion initiated by the PE on whether FE No. 1 should be installed at the ATF, or whether it should go directly to Chile. This discussion is largely programmatic (we all agree it is desirable if possible), addressing
      • will the FE have satisfactorily completed its acceptance requirements? If not, what is the plan for completing them?
      • does the rest of ATF dependancies, e.g. two station correlator, preproduction BE, etc., still mesh with the FE testing at ATF?
      • is this the best use of ATF resources? (what else would we accomplish at ATF in e.g. interferometry if we did not send FE there?)?
  2. Standard documents
  3. JAO Project Scientist Turno now in effect transitioned to Wootten.
  4. Current Science IPT Schedule. Current Operations Schedule. (2007 May 11)
  5. Directories

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 -
2007
 
Day Event
May 13-21
Peck: AEC holo acceptance; OPT.
May 21-27
Emerson (until 30th), Hunter: Holography, OPT.

  1. Astronomer Outreach: NRAO Newsletter ESO Newsletter NAOJNews. NRAO ALMA Calendar
  2. ARCs.
  3. Group Activities (all)
  4. Next meeting is on June 20th (14:30 UT). July 18th for the following month.

Emerson/Laing/Vila-Vilaro -- Instrument Scientists

Conway, Holdaway -- Configuration Group

  • 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). Tony will set up an independent group to assess configuration performance.
  • New <4km Configuration submitted for approval Passed CCB.
  • Proposed ACA Configuration approved.
  • ArrayCenter shows photos of the region of the center of the Array.

Jeff Mangum -- Calibration

  • 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 sent to Robert Laing. NOTE: I need suggested vendors for the temperature profiler.

Robert Lucas -- SSR

  • Latest SSR meeting (2007-05-09)
  • Final checks of Holography at ATF are currently limited by some hardware problems.
  • Current testing of Optical Pointing at ATF in progress.
  • Preparation of Critical Design Review 5, and planning for R5 and R5.1 keep subsystem leads busy...
  • A meeting of Software subsystem leads is scheduled in June in Socorro.

Michiel Hogerheijde -- DRSP See ASAC presentation on this subject, linked above.

  • All DRSP2.0 projects have now been reviewed and response of the authors is requested by Friday April 20. On April 17 a preliminary analysis was discussed by ESAC. The main conclusions were
    • Out of 149 projects from 53 authors, 42 were revised w.r.t. DRSP 1.0; 18 are entirely new; and the reminder (85) was either unchanged or no response was received (but still reviewed).
    • The distribution over science areas has not changed much.
    • Integration times were tweaked here and there, but the main uncertainty lies in including realistic overheads.
    • Quite a few projects requested cross-correlation of the 7m ACA antennas with the baseline-ALMA 12m antennas. While for some projects this is indeed essential, for most this was used only to increase the sensitivity. In terms of scheduling and operations this may be undesirable, and this needs to be reflected in the DRSP to make sure the 7m*12m is not 'overbooked'. How do we want to do the bookkeeping on the 7m*12m requests?
    • Details of the DRSP 2.0 still need to be entered into a spreadsheet, and a tally will be made of requested bandwidths / spectral resolution settings for later translation into correlator modes. OT is almost ready to try this out using DRSP 2.0 projects.
  • Hogerheijde presentation on DRSP2.0 to the ASAC

Once the response of the authors is in, the DRSP2.0 will go on-line without password protection.

Robert Laing -- Commissioning and Science Verification

Mark Holdaway/Steve Myers, Reid -- Imaging

  • CASA Simulator Report

L.-A. Nyman -- Site Characterization

  • On 7 May, Radford reports that he went over to the NRAO container to recover the accumulated interferometer data. I found,
alas, the interferometer had stopped in mid February. I tried restarting it, but there is something wrong with the software setup. I didn't have enough time to investigate further. I suspect the hardware is fine but the software needs reinstallation, which is a half day task and will be much easier with the network and other amenities of the AOS TB. Next time.
  • The battery bank ESO2 now supplying power at the AOS will be moved to the guardhouse at the intersection of CH23 and the ALMA Road. Ulf Kaberger to implement.

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

  • Splatalogue.net became active this week after setting up the database in Manchester and putting out some fires with the database (i.e. server crashing, etc.)
  • AJMK and TR now both have access to the Splatalogue database in Manchester.
  • The database mirror has been set up at NRAO-CV.
  • AJMK is working on the ~200 edits sent by TR for resolving the QNs in the database.

Science Corner:

Papers in astro-ph recently from the Madrid ALMA Conference:
  1. 0704.2286 ALMA : Fourier phase analysis made possible Authors: F. Levrier, E. Falgarone, F. Viallefond
  2. 0702385 Molecular data and radiative transfer tools for ALMA Authors: Floris van der Tak (SRON Groningen), Michiel Hogerheijde (Leiden Observatory)
  3. 0702121 Dense molecular gas in a sample of LIRGs and ULIRGs: The low-redshift connection to the huge high-redshift starbursts and AGNs Authors: J. Gracia-Carpio (1), S. Garcia-Burillo (1), P. Planesas (1) ((1) OAN, Madrid, Spain)
  4. 0701894 Molecular absorptions in high-z objects Authors: F. Combes (LERMA, Obs-Paris)
  5. 0701693 The H$_{2}$ density within spiral and irregular galaxies at high redshift: estimating CO detection limits Authors: Mercedes Mollá, Eduardo Hardy, 'Angeles I. Díaz

Calendar

Official JAO Calendar New!!

ALMA Events of Interest

(see also Al's ALMA Biweekly Calendar)

2007
 
 
 
 
 
Day Date Time Event location details
Mowe
May 14-16
all day
ALMA FE Optics CDR
f2f (Laing attending)
Grenoble
Th
May 17
21:30 UT
ALMA Board Telecon
Telecon
 
 
May 22-25
all day
Software CDR5
f2f
Cville
Jun 13-14
all day
Nutator PDR
Vila-Vilaro attending
Taipei
We
Jun 20
1430UT
ALMA Sci IPT Telecon
Telecon
 
Jun 27-28
all day
ALMA Board Meeting
f2f
Santiago
Jun 29-3Ju1
all day
AMAC f2f Meeting
f2f
Santiago
 
Sep 12-13
all day
B6 CDR
f2f
Cville
We
Jul 18
1430UT
ALMA Sci IPT Telecon
Telecon
 

Upcoming Meetings

OBSERVING PLANETARY SYSTEMS March 5-8, Santiago Presentations Online

Astrophysical Masers and their Environments 2007 March 12-16, Alice Springs, Australia Presentations Online

Astronomical Spectroscopy and the Virtual Observatory March 21-23, Villafranca del Castillo, Villanueva de la Cañada, close to Madrid

Molecules in Space and Laboratory 2007 May 2007 14-18, Paris, France.

Frontiers of Astrophysics, a Celebration of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's 50th Anniversary, June 18-21, 2007, Charlottesville.

Transformational Science with ALMA: Through Disks to Stars and Planets June 22-24, 2007, Cville

North American URSI meeting July 22-26, Ottawa

ALMA Community Meeting and the Workshop on Surveys for ALMA 3-6 Sept, Garching

Massive Star Formation: Observations Confront Theory 10-14 Sept, Heidelberg

Astrophysics in the Next Decade: JWST and Concurrent Facilities September 24-27, 2007, Tucson Arizona

See also NAASC listing

-- AlWootten - 14 May 2007
Topic revision: r10 - 2010-08-03, ToddHunter
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