NAASC Meeting for March 02, 2011

Table of Contents


These minutes are available at https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/ALMA/NaascMinutes2011Mar02

Meeting Logistics:

  • Call date: Wednesday, Mar 02, 2011
  • Call time 13:00 ET or 18:00 UT
  • Duration: 1.0 hr
  • Locations: CV-ER230/TUC-N525/Soc280(SO-conf2)/JAO-Alsacia/JAO-OSF(Science)/NRC
  • Connection for Video:
    • From NRAO select "CV-ER230"
    • hub ip=192.33.117.16
    • alternative ip for Chile only, if above drops: 192.33.117.17
  • USA toll-free Number: 877-803-9367
  • Outside USA Number: +1 517-444-6916
  • Passcode: 8445333#
  • Leader: Hibbard

Attendees:

  • CV: Todd Hunter, Kartik Sheth, Crystal Brogan, Harvey Liszt, Adam, Dongchan, Robin, Rachel, Mark Lacy, Carol, John, Lyndele, Jeff, Dave M, Mike Hatz, Mark Adams, Aaron
  • TUC:
  • Socorro: Amy Kimball (phone)
  • Canada: Gerald
  • Chile:
  • Apologies: BG (Chile), AW (Chile), SS & NM (training), AR (Socorro)

Action Items

Open Action Items:

ACTION: Get any constraints from Directors Office/OSO about next NAASC workshop
  • WHO: Carol
  • DUE:
  • DONE:
  • NOTES:

Closed Action Items:

ACTION: EPO F2F - is there anything that we need to submit for NAASC?
  • WHO: Tania
  • DUE: 3/5/2011
  • DONE: 3/4/2011
  • NOTES: Nothing appears relevant

Agenda

  • Personnel
  • Project News (CSV Liaisons)
    • ALMA Monthly Reports
    • ALMA Newsletter
    • Al's report from ANASAC telecon: "Eight antennas are available: DV02 in pad J504; DV04 in pad T702; DV05 in pad J505; DV06 in pad T704; DV07 in pad J510; DV08 in pad T703; DV09 in pad N602; PM02 in pad T701. Furthermore at the OSF, DV01 and DV10 are engaged in interferometry as part of the test interferometer. DV11, DV12 and PM01 were recently accepted and are undergoing outfitting. The AEM antenna DM41 has undergone its further pointing and holography tests at the AEM Camp."
  • Group Reports
    • NaascManagement (Carol)
      • ANASAC (AWootten)
        • Last telecon: Feb 18, 2pm ET. See Agenda. They are discussion topics for next NAASC workshop (location?). See Main Topic
        • See Agenda for ASAC f2f meeting for current ASAC charges
      • ALMA Development including text of proposed Call (internal only). New: Webpage for development workshop to be held March 21-22 in Charlottesville. 17 outside registrants, a few dozen from NRAO, some from NRC (incl. Doug J.) Update from Todd on EU process.
      • Science Communications & EPO (T. Burchel/Lyndele)
        • Material submitted for March eNews: NAASCEnewsPlanningMarch2011
        • Collecting material for next ALMA Newsletter, including article on NAASC: ALMAScienceNewsMar2011
        • Tania will be attending EPO f2f meeting in Chile soon. AI: M. Adams: find out from Tania if there are any agenda items from that meeting that we need to be aware of
      • Other items reported by CL
        • NSB approved NAASC guidance budget
        • New structure for collecting active Action Items from all groups onto top-level NAASC wiki (pulls AI from group pages as long as they have the correct format - Lyndele will send email to group leads about this format)
        • Fred has asked us to represent all NRAO facilities during our outreach efforts. Various people are collecting relevant slides (Adam, Crystal)
        • Groups are overlapping. CL will ask group leads to write charters.
        • Will start inviting others to monday group leads meeting (e.g. Scott to report on Postdoc mentoring 1/mo)
        • Send CL email for any items that you wish discussed at Mondays group leads meeting
    • News from NRC (Schieven)
        • Getting new polycom so they stop getting bumped from our meetings
        • Reported on NRC-supported training events. Should be captured on UserSupportGroup wiki. What I captured: 2 day Toronto April; 2 day Calgary May; 2 day Victoria May; 1 day London June (part of CASCA); maybe Quebec in June
        • Primer got first document number from ALMA
    • UserSupportGroup (Carol)
      • See USG2011Feb28Minutes
      • NRC has ~5 CDEs planned - Toronto (Apr), Calgary (May), London (June, w/CASCA), Quebec? (June?). We have Philly, Santa Fe, Pasadena, Chile coming up. Primer is first official ALMA Doc. Triage meeting on Friday w/AR.
    • DataServicesGroup (Mark)
      • See DataServicesMeetingMinutes
      • Any action for GB "Data Volume" meeting?
      • Need to have EU do pre-release testing of "ALMA Observing Support Tool" (OST). Science Portal looks good. Plone preview yesterday.
    • JAOSupportGroup (John H)
      • See JAOsupportMinutes2011Feb24
      • Integrated Test 3: Feb concentrated on Proposal Assessment and panel meetings. Great diversity of opinions on how TA should be done. Ph2 test just completed (not very well organized; not many use cases exercised). Project Tracker section is up next.
      • SciOpsPoliciesWGs: apart from TA, most of these groups have produced advanced drafts for each of their areas. These were sent to ASAC for comment. See wiki's (from SciOpsPoliciesWGs link) for latest version of docs (I hope!)
      • John H. is traveling to Garching for SciOpsIPT f2f meeting next week. Please send him topics you wish this group to consider. Link to Agenda items (Sciops wiki). Model that CIPT wants for JIRA (only 2 people per ARC can enter JIRA tickets for CIPT systems) may be problematic. Raise at f2f meeting; also talk to J.Kern about it when he visits week of Mar2
      • Ed F. has finished up 3mo tour in Chile. Al in Chile for turnos and ASAC meeting (just ended). Kartik heads down on Saturday for 3 weeks. Will also do a CDE at PUC.
    • Imaging/Data Tiger Team (Crystal) will meet tomorrow
  • Main Topic: Next NAASC workshop
    • Timeframe probably Fall 2011. No set location. Probably need feedback from Fred and/or OSO before we go too far with this
    • Recall that there is a tentative plan to sponsor a joint workshop with ASIAA in late 2012; location probably Hawaii.
    • ANASAC suggestions (taken from Agenda from Feb18 ANASAC meeting):
      • From Dust to Rocks to Planets - Bringing together the ALMA, EVLA,VLBA, and GBT communities together with dynamicists, modelers, latest results from exoplanet surveys, protostellar disks, KBO/asteroid observations, etc. Particularly timely now that Kepler results are out. Interested parties: AW, CB, SS? New Jansky (Airle Mulee?)
      • The Growth of Galaxy Disks - Outer disks of the MW and other galaxies. Extended UV disks, SF thresholds, dynamics, disk regrowth, environmental influences, disks at high redshifts. Needs to avoid overlap with NAASC 2009 meeting on "Assembly, gas content, and SF histories of galaxies", and "Galaxies through cosmic time". Clear connection between ALMA/EVLA/GBT
      • Physics and Evolution of Galaxy Clusters - We thought that perhaps there was too much overlap with other conferences this year (Irvine, Huntsville). But it may be that there still is appetite. SZ effect, intracluster shocks, dense clusters and galaxy groups, environmental effects on galaxies, etc.
      • Jets, winds, and outflows - A meeting to bring together the protostellar and AGN jet communities, including galaxy feedback. Interested parties: CL, ML, CB (TH)
  • Any Other Business

Additional Supporting Material

NAASC items submitted to JAO for February 2011 Monthly report

Hiring activities

Adam Leroy formally started as a NAASC astronomer on March 1. Adam was a Jansky Fellow at NRAO-Charlottesville prior to this, and before that was a postdoc at MPIA. Offers were made for the next two NAASC Postdoctoral Fellow positions.

JAO support

Stuartt Corder & Al Wootten provided support to the JAO Science team in Chile. The NAASC welcomed JAO Deputy Director Lewis Ball for a one-week visit.

Contributed and reviewed final drafts of Operations procedures for Proposal review, Phase2 change requests, Technical Assessment, Archive & Science Portal, and Helpdesk Staff Guide and Administrators Guide. Contributed to preliminary drafts of the ALMA Cycle 0 Proposers Guide and Instructions to PIs for Technical Justification.

The NA Imaging "Tiger Team": produced studies evaluating ALMA ES configuration candidates, and reviewed and made notes on several ALMA test datasets.

Software Development & testing

Continued participation ALMA Operations Integrated Test No. 3, including OT Load testing, the proposal assessment process and panel review process, and phase 2 submission. Stuartt Corder participated in the meeting at the JAO to test the proposal review tools. Worked with the pipeline group in Socorro. The ARC instance of the science portal was tested internally. Work continued on advanced "single sign-on" capabilities.

CASA support: software testing for R3.2; planning for R3.3 cycle; refinement of CASA imaging tasks.

Conferences and workshops

Preparations continued for an ALMA development workshop to be held at NRAO-Charlottesville March 21-22, and a draft of the development call was refined, for discussion at the workshop.

ALMA Early Science "Community Day" events, including hands-on training with the OT and Simdata, were held at the Institute for Astronomy in Hawai'i (Feb 10-11), and at the NAASC in Charlottesville, VA (Feb 25). NAASC staff gave ALMA-related presentation at the Carma symposium in Berkeley and at a science seminar at James Madison University.

A second NAASC staff training event was held in Charlottesville, as was a project-wide training "webinar" for helpdesk administrators.

-- JohnHibbard - 2011-03-07
Topic revision: r2 - 2011-04-06, JohnHibbard
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