Minutes of the Feb 1 ASAC Telecon

Participants: Does anyone have the list?

Project News MT The Project Scientist position has been readvertised. Posted on relevant science magazines and via the standard ESO and NRAO system. All of us should be actively participating in this activity suggesting names of qualified applicants.

A major step was taken at the last board meeting on the operation plan. Comments were received on the present version of the plan. A new version will be released in March. Version "A" to be submitted for approval in April at the Board face to face meeting in Pasadena. The goal is to start recruiting key people in operations as soon as the plan has been approved. (This will allow, for example, to involve the operations staff to the interferometric test programme with the antenna prototypes)

EvD: Are there any major changes in the PS job advertisement? Not substantially. Is the 10 yr experience still in? Yes, but we encourage younger people to apply.

CW: Are there changes in the Operations plan wrt the version we commented? Yes, but not substantial. The critical area is the ram up, the plan is not final here. Plus comments from Japan are being prepared and will be submitted soon.

TB The major activity is still rebaselining. A meeting was held between JAO and ALMA-Japan. The information that is coming in is not dramatically surprising. Possible rebaselining options are being elaborated at the moment. It may not be possible to analyse all of them, but would like to have a sort of gross ranking. Hope to find not so painful rescoping options.

Antenna prototype testing: intensive activity, substantial progress. In most cases the concerns have been removed (or issues understood).

Meeting between the groups assembling/integr/verif/operations in socorro in January. Assigned responsabilities, very productive. Plan will be distributed in the coming weeks. Ramp up of operations was also discussed, good progress in this area.

Board Communications We have not yet received a formal response, but a final draft exist. Most people on the Board recognized that we did not had enough info to elaborate a useful report in October, others would have liked us to be more explicit.

New charges will be related to the old ones. Formal ones are not yet ready. We basically expect two charges: 1. Examine the status of alma rebaseling. Review the rebaselining plan and comment the science impact of rebaselining. Specifically 40 or 50 operating Ants. 2. Revisit large/short project and demonstration science. Plus an unfinished charge which may not be ready for the coming ASAC meeting.

Board has been warned that we will not have much time to discuss the rebaselining options. Current planning aims at delivering the rescope options a week or few days in advance to our meeting.

In preparation to the Antenna number discussion, it will be useful to re-circulate the old calculations used at our October meeting. It would be useful to extend the simulations down to 40. We also need to receive inputs on the effects of going to 40 antennas for reconfiguration scenarios. Is the zooming concept still viable? How do we design the array (for how many antennas)?

We might save a number of pads if the array is reduced to 50 antennas (or even below!).

Will the Japanese contribution be considered as descoping options? The Board clarified that this is not a possible option. Japanese members confirm that there is no way they can change their plan.

Can we have a possible advance of what we can consider for descoping? Deferring something like electronics may be more sensible than deferring something like antennas (easier to implement later). Remakable saving in deferring one of the IFs. In reality, only a substantial change (deferring one IF pair, or antennas) can produce a real effect. Deferring one receiver band is not a big saving at this time. Delay the outer stations in the first part of the project is another oprion.

How are we going to prepare for the Garching Face to Face? Very hard to prepare. We can use what we had done for the last report. An area in which we need to work more is the imaging quality. We need to devise a way to compare the proposed changes to the DRSP programmes. very tough to get a lot of analysis in this limited timeframe.

Homework to be done before the meeting: Analyse the primary descope (50/40 Antennas) on the DRSP and Level 1 science requirements. Jean will coordinate the of the DRSP analysis split among us. It will be useful to look for projects which could not be cured by longer integration time.

Discussion of proto-charge 2. '>From the hints we have, it looks exactly the same as before.
Jean Turner will ask the Board for clarification. We will wait for the response and then go ahead from that.

New membership: Andrew Blain is substituting Phil Myers as North American ASAC members.

Comments on the Face to Face draft agenda: deferr less critical items (regional reports, outreach, second charge) to the second day, so that we will have time to carefully think over the first charge.

A good thing will be to ask for a presentation of the Antenna tests results.

ESAC Report: We had a long telecon. Project update, preparation of the ESAC F2F. An important agenda item (in addition to the ASAC issues) will be the ARC organization in Europe (Feb 4 meeting) and the ALMA-EC Band 5 Project. ANASAC Rep: AAS meeting, Min Yun conversation with Chris Smith (NOAO) to build a wide band connection US-Chile. Not much else except a membership turnover. AAS talks on the ALMA AEDM, meeting went very well.

Pan-ALMA meeting. Spanish have informally agreed for fall 2006. Funding mostly from EU side. Japan will contribute? Kawabe-san will be Japan contact. Is Japan planning a science meeting in 2006: no! There will be a millimneter meeting (Fukui san) when? (to be checked). Looking for conflicts and aim to finalize the date in February. Mostly science meeting with some talks but not many for the project. May have proceedings from Kluwer.

Sci IPT report. Look at the presentation on the sciver/ass/comm meeting. Working for the descoping document and risk assesment. In Eu: most activity for the ARC meeting Feb 4.

-- AlWootten - 07 Apr 2005
Topic revision: r1 - 2005-04-07, AlWootten
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