ANASAC Telecon minutes December 19, 2013

John Hibbard Phil Jewell Al Wootten Alberto Bolatto John Carpenter Richard Crutcher Kelsey Johnson Dan Marrone Karin Oberg Rachel Oesten Dick Plambeck Douglas Scott

Online agenda: https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/ALMA/19Dec13Agenda

ANASAC

-- A new Terms of Reference has been drafted for the ANASAC since it will become a subcommittee of the NRAO Users Committee.

-- Crutcher, Neufeld, Osten, Mumma and Looney terms on the ANASAC expire on December 31. Continuing members have been added to the NRAO Users Committee for the remainder of their terms.

-- The NRAO users committee will have a face-to-face meeting in Greenbank in May. The plan is to have a ANASAC meeting in Charlottesville for one day, and then a full committee meeting in Green Bank for 2 days. In 2015, the face-to-face meeting will be in Socorro.

-- The ANASAC Report with NRAO response has been delivered to the ANASAC. A verbal summary was provided in the November 2013 ANASAC meeting. No one from the ANASAC had further questions or comments on the written report.

-- The response of the ASAC to the interim charge has been delivered to the Board and is posted on the ANASAC web site. The Board accepted the report but there was not much discussion. In March, the ASAC would like to revisit the priorities since the JAO staffing levels for commissioning will be reduced at that time. The ANASAC should provide comments to the ASAC members.

ALMA Development

-- Nine study proposals were submitted. There was complete support for five proposal, little support for three proposals, and support for some aspects of another proposal.

-- The recommendations from the review panel for the ALMA developement studies has been given to the NSF, and is waiting their consent. A multi-year funding line trying to fit that within the budget with some money left over for other studies. The results could be posted as soon as this afternoon.

-- For the projects, a review committees met in November and the recommendations will be presented in a report to the NSF for their consent. Unlike the studies, the projects will also need to be discussed at the ASAC and approved by the Board. A report will be delivered to the ASAC in time for the ASAC face-to-face meeting January 31-February 1. The Board will discuss the recommendations at the Feb 5 Board meeting.

Observing Status

-- The 12m antennas are being moved toward more compact configurations. The schedule for moving to extended configurations will be determined in the spring.

-- The observing efficiency in two recent scheduling sessions was 53%. Weather is the main factor limiting the efficiency.

-- Many antennas may have only one band of a receiver working. i.e., few antennas work on all bands. This is limiting the number of antennas available for science observations.

-- The limited number staff may be responsible for not having more antennas online, but a specific, detailed plan and argument of how more staff will lead to more available antennas has not been presented.

-- The ALMA Board asked the JAO for plan to get 45 antennas online by June 1.

Cycle 2 comments from the ANASAC

-- The submission process seemed to have gone well overall, but there was a lot of comments and issues raised about the OT. The detailed comments have been sent to NAASC and only the more common issues will be listed here.

-- Many people were frustrated by having to entered the technical justification into the OT. The ANASAC raised the question on how the reviewers will use the technical justification since there were heterogeneous approaches to filling it out.

-- There was a lot of confusion regarding the overheads computed in the observing tool. Some were surprised by the large overheads, others noted the overhead would change dramatically by changing the on-source time a little bit, others found the overhead would change when rerunning the tool. Hibbard indicated that there needs to be bug fixes, better documentation on how the overheads are computed, and there should be an option to provide more verbose information. There were other issues that are documented in the detailed comments.

-- ANASAC suggested that the user should be able to specify the calibration precision rather than just use the OT default.

-- It would be useful to provide a tool to set bands back-to-back if only looking for a single line and want to set the other bands to get continuous velocity coverage.

-- The ANASAC is concerned that users may not be requesting ACA time even when scientifically useful because the total time appears large. There should be a way to request the ACA without the total power antennas.

Next telecon
February 20, 2014

-- AlWootten - 2013-12-21

Topic attachments
I Attachment ActionSorted ascending Size Date Who Comment
ALMA_Development_PROJECTSv25.pdfpdf ALMA_Development_PROJECTSv25.pdf manage 4 MB 2014-02-01 - 13:36 AlWootten ALMA NA Projects Funded 2014-2015
NA_ALMA_Dev_2014_Study_Sum_v2.pdfpdf NA_ALMA_Dev_2014_Study_Sum_v2.pdf manage 445 K 2014-02-01 - 13:33 AlWootten ALMA Studies Funded 2014-2015
Topic revision: r1 - 2014-02-01, AlWootten
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