Offer was declined for staff scientist position as CSV Liaison No. 2. We are awaiting confirmation to make offer to next candidate, pending Harvey's approval.
Offer for NAASC CASA Developer has been declined. We are debating what to do with this position.
Offer was accepted for ALMA EPO Program Officer. Expect to arrive in August.
Hibbard would like to set up a meeting for FY2009 NAASC staff to discuss functional assignments, hiring strategies, etc. Availability?We met after this meeting. Results posted to NAASC wiki
CFP for SIS development work had only one bid received, from UVML. Waiting for NSF to sign off on it.
Shouldn't plans be made for next f2f meeting? Being made
Working on charge on "Community Support".
Charge on ALMA Development was tabled by ALMA Board
Main Event:
Since we are up to our eyeballs in reporting (see above), so lets just hear briefly on the following items:
from Crystal about plans for summer school casa tutorials. Will be ~30 students. CB, EF, SM, DS, GvM, RR will give tutorials. Will be parallel AIPS tutorials. There will be a freeze for the summer school release by the end of the month. All NAASC staff should spend some time testing. Steve and Brian have sent emails saying the best things to test.
something about wikis for casa users from John I forget what this even alludes to. My notes say "to cabal. let me know". ???
from Tony about efforts on the spectral line front (see report under Working Groups below)
Reports from Working Groups
Software Testing
Pipeline testing: report of last test is in draft stage. See CIPT->pipeline wiki
Offline testing: there should be something before the summer school. See main topic.
ObsTool. Test 5 scheduled for May. I have seen no instructions yet. Official NA testers are Deb, Jeff, Antonio & James. Unofficial testers are Al, Harvey, Todd & Dana.
Casapy simulator:
ALMA Archive: Report from last test done and will be submitted soon.
MM Calibrator/Spectral Line Databases (Tony Remijan)
Progress continues on Splatalogue for a presentation at the OSU meeting on molecular spectroscopy in June. We may need a few "testers" to check out their favorite species to make sure everything is working correctly and that all the data are entered correctly. We are in the stages of updates. That is, we are including new data into Splatalogue that has appeared on the JPL and CDMS websites in the last year. This often required re-entering the entire species. To do so, takes ~10 mins/species.
In response to the "WAG Report" from UVa which (paraphrasing) says "A unique resource to UVa is the presence on campus grounds of the home office of NRAO...Departments should seek out major collaborations esp with the NAASC...which will ensure substantial benefits for UVa." As such, we have submitted a pre-proposal to the NSF for the development of a major astrochemistry department. The pre-proposal can be found: NSF CCI Preproposal. If we are accepted, it will take place in 2 phases. Phase I at the amount of 500K/year to UVa for 3 years will be a proof of concept and setting up the center. Phase II at the amount of 4M/year to UVa for 10 years will be maintaining an active center for astrochemistry centered in CHV. One of the first "hires" to UVa Chemistry may be Sandra Brueken from Harvard. Also, even if the NSF money doesn't come through, UVa and the Chemistry departments may go ahead with some aspect of this initiative.
We should hear confirmation of our Pre-proposal by May 25; the Phase I proposal will be due on July 25. Stay tuned.
Webpages (Aaron Evans):
New NRAO webpage is near beta release. Fred wants NAASC to pioneer science user outreach.
EPO (Adams)
We need revised ALMA EPO plan/staff ramp-up from Mark by Dec 15 THIS IS STILL NEEDED!!!
NAASC Workshops (Remy)
Massive Star Formation. SOC co-chairs=Remy & Andrew Baker.