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Contact Information

  • 2008-3-19 14:30 UT Please check your local time; it may have changed!
  • Note: C. Wilson points out line noise may be muted by pressing *6 which works thru the call center.
  • Duration: 1 hr
  • USA Toll Free Number: 877-874-1919
  • Toll Number: +1-203-320-9891
  • Passcode: 185064
  • Leader: Al Wootten
  • Attendees: Emerson, Nikolic, Hills, Testi, Wotten, Reid, Hales, Mangum, Indebetouw, Chris, Liu, Lucas, Laing, Myers, Remijan, Peck, Hibbard

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.

First Japanese 12m antenna moon image Result of the Initial Testing of the Japanese ACA 12-m Antenna to be Delivered to ALMA. First Radio Image of the Moon Taken with an ACA Antenna. Wavelength: 2mm. See press release.

See other images and animations. See other images and transporters.

  1. New Business--Project news/updates (Hills, Peck)
    • ALMA Board, ASAC News.
      • The Board is to meet f2f in Chile on 1-4 April 2008.
      • The ASAC met, also in Santiago, on 1-2 Feb 2008. See ASAC Charges and ASAC selected presentations. The report is still embargoed but has gone to the ALMA Board.
    • JAO, ARC news:
      • ALMA Director Job Ad.
      • Chris Carilli will move to new position as Observatory Chief Scientist, as soon as his replacement as the AD for NAASC is in place. An open search for a new AD for NAASC is being headed by Paul Vanden Bout and the vacancy notice is posted.
      • Jobs. Commissioning Scientist Santiago Positions, offers made, some acceptances. ARC Positions closed, offers made, some acceptances.
    • Science IPT
    • Current ALMA System Block Diagram Vers O.

  1. 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 - Follow up from last meeting
    • Change Control Board items, other technical concerns (Hills)
      • Polarization. See discussion items circulated by Hills.
      • LO Phase lock bandwidth. CRE 179 proposes reducing this which should reduce phase noise at the highest frequencies but lose a little efficiency from the lag when phase switching.
      • Line Stretcher Compensation Is it really necessary to use a closed-loop servo to compensate for the line-length changes or would it be sufficient to simply measure the changes and correct them all in software - either by adjusting the LO phase or in the data reduction? Follow link to attachment please for discussion.
      • Acceleration of the 7m ACA antennas. CRE 184 proposes reducing the maximum accelerations and demonstrates that the loss of observing efficiency will be small. See table at Jan 2007 discussion.
      • Here Draft Front End Pointing CRE is a first version of a change request aimed at ensuring that the any pointing errors arising due to deflections in the front end are small. Differential movements between the receivers would be particularly damaging to offset pointing.
      • QuarterwavePlates are suggested for B7. A proposed specification is among FE IPT documents. We proposed these to begin a dialog with FE in July 2006. At that time there was a f2f meeting with FE and Sci here in Cville. A reply was posted to edm 14 months later calling for review and approval of these specifications; I am unaware that this was discussed in a science or cal group meeting. Let us proceed: is the proposed bandwidth and center agreed? How accurately does it need to be a quarter wave? A memo on the SMA device is attached at the bottom of the agenda.
      • Report on B10 Review
    • 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
Mar 17
Mar 24
Laing, Hunter, Hales
Mar 31
Laing, Hales, Wootten
Apr 7
Indebetouw, Wootten, Peck

  • OSF
2008
 
Week Event
Mar ?
Emerson VxRSI antenna contractor handover testing begins 4 Feb

  1. Next meeting is on April 16th (14:30 UT). May 21st for the following month.
  2. Astronomer Outreach: New ESO ALMA Webpages New New NRAO Newsletter appearing soon (text in attachments). 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

Holdaway, Reid -- Configuration Group

  • ExtendedConfiguration Work
    • Holdaway's description of the development of the design for the extended ALMA configurations, rev 2 for edm.
  • Work has begun on six foundations along Road 11 near the AOS TB. The first 6 foundations under construction are: 104,136,109,96,101,106. Three of these are along a spur in Road 11; minimum baseline there is about 100m; maximum baseline is about 1.4 km. AIV may have a requirement that the first antennas be located on pads near the building; that is not a science requirement. Our requirements for the first 6-8 antenna locations are given in an approved document by Conway, ALMA 90-02.00.00-004-A-SPE First Science Array Configurations. This was written with the 64 station design as a starting point; Wootten is reviewing it now to determine what changes are needed for a 50 station design as now approved.
  • Final configuration design. We continue to assess performance - see imaging, below, and possible improvements. Some initial results from Holdaway's recent study are attached to that link.
  • http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~rreid/telesims/cfgeval has been created as a repository of miscellaneous configuration evaluation items.

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

  • A set of ALMA PSFs with varying amounts of robust weighting has been made and summarized in weighting.html. It will be useful for determining how much Briggs weighting to use when, but the most immediately interesting result is that it should be possible to use any resolution in the ALMA range with only a litte reweighting: . The set is being extended with tapered beams.
  • 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.
    • 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 (2008-3-12).
  • Testing of integrated system at the ATF, using data in ASDM format.
  • Testing of TelCal: phase measurement, delay measurement, phase curve .
  • ACA Correlator integration work continued

Michiel Hogerheijde -- DRSP

  • No progress 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

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

Science Corner:

On the Detection of High Redshift Black Holes with ALMA through CO and H2 Emission Authors: M. Spaans (Kapteyn), R Meijerink (Berkeley)

Calendar

Official JAO Calendar

ALMA Events of Interest

(see also Al's ALMA Biweekly Calendar)
2007
 
 
 
 
 
Day Date Time Event location details
 
Mar 26
 
ALMA Production Workshop follow-on
telecon
 
 
Apr 2-4
 
ALMA Board
f2f
Chile
 
April 16
 
ALMASci Telecon
Telecon
 
 
May 5
 
ASAC Telecon
Telecon
 
 
May 15
 
ALMA Board
Telecon
 

Upcoming Meetings

-- AlWootten - 17 Mar 2008
Topic attachments
I Attachment Action Size Date Who CommentSorted ascending
SciIPT19Mar08notes.txttxt SciIPT19Mar08notes.txt manage 7 K 2008-03-21 - 10:31 AlWootten Al's jottings during the discussion.
Apr08newsltr.pdfpdf Apr08newsltr.pdf manage 7 MB 2008-03-18 - 17:22 AlWootten ALMA NRAO Newsletter Article
sma_polmemo_156.psps sma_polmemo_156.ps manage 2 MB 2008-03-18 - 17:21 AlWootten SMA Polarization Memo, No. 156
Topic revision: r8 - 2010-08-02, ToddHunter
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