Thursday, 1:30pm MT, 3:30pm pm ET, 2 October 2025

Logistics

Agenda

• GMVA and ALMA (All)
• 26A
  • Large Proposal TAC Meeting (Dana)
    • Agenda: https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/Software/TTA26ATACLPAgenda
  • TAC Meeting (Dana)
    • Agenda: https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/Software/TTA26ATACAgenda
• AOB

Minutes

• GMVA and ALMA. A lengthly discussion of many of the issues. Here is a summary.
  • The main goals of NRAO's proposal are a bit confusing since there are several issues with the current approach and the TTA group does not entirely agree which are the most important issues. Currently, for GMVA+ALMA proposals authors need to submit two proposals: one to NRAO and one to ALMA. This is not too bad since the ALMA proposal should have the same scientific jsutification as the NRAO proposal and the technical informaiton for VLBI proposals is typically a textbox. This in part depends on the details; for example, a spectral line proposal does require configuring the correlator. But since the deadline and review period are differnet this does cause extra work for authors; for example, they have to wait longer for any planning and in some cases sumbit another NRAO proposal since they do not know if the ALMA proposal was approved (this is because NRAO has semesters and ALMA has cycles). Moreover, the ALMA review provides only an up or down decision, with no score, which is sometimes hard to fold into other reviews when the GMVA is making a decision whether to schedule the project or not. Additional metrics could be supplied by ALMA, however, that would not need to go through the ALMA board.
  • Technically there is a review double jeopardy regardless of whether ALMA is included or not since some other GMVA members do provide a review. In most cases, however, the review of other GMVA members is consistent with the NRAO TAC; this is not the case with ALMA. Of course the oversubscript at ALMA is typcially 7:1; though VLBI proposals do generally score better than average.
  • After much discussion, we agreed that there is one plausible proposal that could be brought to the ALMA board. This would be for ALMA to accept the overall GMVA decision, like they do with joint proposals. Since joint proposals are capped this is slightly different. We felt that capping GMVA proposals was not a good idea. We therefore need some metrics to assess the quality of the GMVA proposals that typically get approved. AnandCrossley will produce some metrics (e.g., number of GMVA proposals and total hours that are approved by the NRAO TAC, which are typically approved by the other observatories, w.r.t. linear-rank).
• 26A
  • Large Proposal TAC Meeting. All materials have been uploaded to the secure wiki and we are ready to go early tomorrow. We will start with VLA and in particular the EGS proposal.
  • TAC Meeting. Currently, at best we will only have 5 TAC members in person. Please let JessicaBurns know if you will be in-person.