Revised 05/05/05 CW Present:

Testi C. Wilson Turner Mundy Carilli van Dishoeck Mardones Momose Wootten Emerson Richer T. Wilson Laing

1. Old Business

Minutes from last meeting are written but not yet posted; will be posted on web page for this meeting later this week; please check them

  1. Project news/updates (Wootten/T. Wilson)

- only two weeks since last ASAC telecon (it was delayed to be after Board face-to-face meeting) so not a lot of new news - expect announcement on antennas June 23 (after Board meeting) - first Band 6 receiver put into cryostat, cooled down; beginning beam tests - with Band 3 receiver in Victoria, testing saturation level of mixer last week - call for tenders for OSF issued - foundation package for AOS in hand, construction should start in August - site characterization instruments lived through last weeks big snowfall - ESO STC had discussions about antennas - big item is ESO finance committee meeting next week - European ALMA newsletter came out last week

LT: news about rebaselining? AW - Board will deal with antenna contracts and rebaselining at June face-to-face meeting; rebaselining expected to take effect June 30 - in U.S., NSF needs to find $20M to fund large optical telescope design; scrutinizing everything, including ALMA Operations; - two things happening here: (1) senior review to happen in July -- will review ALL radio observatories with an eye to cutting back and closing things to make room for ALMA ops and large optical telescope development (2) in October/November will be an invasive audit of ALMA; have had one before, of MMA in 1999 (that was where the need for nutators came from)

CW: what's happening with Band 5? TW: EU in February said can negotiate; wanted to see papers before negotiate (by April 1); now are revising those papers; deep into discussions with software/receiver people in ALMA: how will it fit into ALMA, make sure doesn't slow down anything else, make sure are no open questions before start negotiating with EU - scope is 8 Band 5 Rx; also asked for software to allow exact correction of phase to very high degree; also asked for OTF interferometry to rapidly map large areas before weather changed; these are the parts of the original proposal that survivied; capped requeste from 12.5M to 8.5M Euros

  1. Board Communications (Turner, Testi)

* Response to our report

LT - board telecon last week (JT,LT,AW attended); agenda quite busy so no discussion of response to our report AW - thinks will be a written response after next Board telecon

* New Charges

- Board telecon realized need new charges; want a report for Nov meeting so ASAC to meet September; Richard Wade considers our input from last time sufficient to write draft charge to be discussed Board telecon end of May - last time two things we discussed were (1) old charge 2 from last meeting possibly linked to demonstration science (2) science verification plan if more complete version is available

EvD - once decision on AN is reached, will look at rest of project; may still be a charge on rebaselining that comes to us LT - may have to wait to see the response to our report? CW - don't see need to add charge on rebaselining now; can add it at any time i.e. if looks like it is needed after June 30; for any charge in this area we will get the information from the project at the last minute, in any case

* Face-to-face meeting--dates

Constraints: TW - heads of IPT meeting Chile Sept 26-30 CW - Astrochemistry meeting August 29-Sept 2 JT - UCLA quarter starts late September (last week usually)

LT - JT to look into the hotel i.e. can we do face-to-face in LA CW - AW to set up calendar of people's availability?

  1. Science IPT Report (Wootten/Wilson)

- John Conway moving ahead on configuration design, hoping new one by May 15; finished with compact configuration; in the midst of optimizing intermediate arrays now - spirited discussion on nutator requirements on the wiki; Al will write a summary up soon and put on ALMA EDM - design for patch panel that connects to correlator, sub-array capability and use, science IPT writing response to JAO; no change to recommendation for number of subarrays expected - final stages of going over ancillary calibration equipment document and making sure all recommended instruments in WBS and accord with spares policy - Partin-Pintado is pushing ahead with last tests of semi-transparent vane for amplitude calibration

LT: is it true that ACA correlator is not as flexible as baseline correlator plus tunable filters? i.e. not all modes available with both? RL: he's trying to find out; this is a major issue that has come up as part of the ACA review; document from Japanese is coming

  1. Astronomer Outreach:

* ESAC Report (van Dishoeck)

- not much to report; long telecon 2 weeks ago; mostly informing non-ASAC members about what had happened at ASAC/ALMA Board meetings; informational meeting; some feedback from STC meeting (already reported by TW), some on European ARC organization; quite a lot of discussion on this, but looks like going ahead as planned; main step is hiring of ARC manager in ESO, advertizement out for this - 1st workshop: had very successful S-Z workshop in Paris last month (lots of X-ray and optical observers too); still a strong science case for Band 1 for ALMA; some presentations on web site for meeting - 2nd workshop: Galactic/Extragalactic modelling: October, 2005 Sweden; Aalto is organizing, contact her if interested - 3rd workshop: line surveys with ALMA; planned for spring 2006

- TW gave presentation on ALMA at ESO Users Committee meeting; first time he's been asked; they want to have regular presentations/updates at their meetings from now on; large committee

* ANASAC Report (Carilli)

- ANASAC had a telecon last week; number of questions about Band 5 proposal i.e. how are these decisions made, how are they counted against the project, etc. - one question that came up was leeway to change contribution; does it have to go to Band 5 or could it be something else? TW: locked into Band 5; discussion of how this will be counted (i.e. + for Europe?) has not arisen; EvD: proposal came up because unique opportunity to obtain funding; line of funding was for enhancements to projects in construction; ALMA project was informed at very early stage

- had discussion about NRC report on ALMA led by JT; JT: she assumes the letter has gone in by now; they had Mark Holdaway doing simulations; Mark Reid seemed to be writing section on image fidelity and has good feel for limitations of simulations CC: did extragalactic science ever get even a cursory nod? EvD: Blandford said comments she sent were very helpful (on both disks and extgal); he said have finished report and it is now under review CC: will we ever see it? JT: she doesn't know; she'll be at a meeting third week of May and she can find out; doesn't think are always made public ...

- will have face-to-face ANASAC meeting in June; question was whether ANASAC will just get info or will have input into the process i.e. rebaselining, antennas, etc. AW: ASAC report reflects whole ALMA community; would be useful to have the NA community endorse the report, or if not the whole thing, say which bit disagree with, etc.; would be very useful LT: in Europe, the ESAC reviews and discusses the charges before the ASAC meeting, so that the European members of ASAC can bring the consensus opinion to the ASAC discussions; it would be useful if ANASAC could adopt a similar procedure

- discussed new membership and new chairman; will go through chair in Cambridge; new members are Ho, Brogan, Baker, Balley, Wright, Williams

- NRAO building is finished and ALMA people have moved into new offices

5. Next Meeting 2005-June-7 14:30 UT

-- AlWootten - 05 May 2005
Topic revision: r2 - 2005-05-05, AlWootten
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