[asac] Draft of enhancements document available

[ewine at strw.leidenuniv.nl]

                                          October 9, 2001


Dear ASAC members,

A draft of the document "Scientific Justification for the ALMA Enhancements"
can be downloaded from:

    http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~ewine/enhancements.ps   19M
or  http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~ewine/enhancements.pdf   2M

For Bands 1, 4, 8 and the 2G correlator, it is nearly identical to our
previous document. The cases for Band 10 and the ACA have been added,
together with an introduction, a more general description of the
receiver bands (including the bands in the Baseline project and bands
2 and 5), and a short summary of the prioritization at the end. As
suggested by the project, I have also added some absolute value (Top
priority, Very high priority etc.)  to the categories.

Not all figures are yet in final form; in particular:

- Figure 1 is still lacking

- Figure 7 should be shortened to <0.5 page by taking just the lowest 2
  spectra (I would like to keep some line survey figure in the manuscript,
  since it is also relevant for the 2G correlator discussion)

- Figure 11 may be improved with more recent CO 2-1 and/or HCO+ 1-0 data 
  (if I find time)

Furthermore:

- Table 1 will be extended to add the main science drivers (cf. Table in our
September 2000 report)

- Table 2: this is a subset of the table sent in June by Hasegawa et
a.l; I selected some highlights to show that some projects need the ACA
whereas others don't. Comments welcome.


Finally, we have to decide whether ACA stands for Atacama Compact
Array or ALMA Compact Array. I thought the former, but there are
official ALMA memos with both names on the Web (even one with ALMA
Complementary Array)! Put in your vote now....  The big memo by
Guilloteau, Pety and Gueth on the ACA simulations is nearly finished
and should be put on the Web soon (this is the document to which we
refer both in the ASAC report and in the enhancements document).  The
ASAC report still needs an extra paragraph on future work on the ACA
simulations, since it belongs in that document, not in the
enhancements document. One important point to note is that the current
ALMA + SD results are probably on the optimistic side because they use
rather stringent specifications for the SD pointing and beam errors.

Please send comments on the enhancements document by THURSDAY at the latest,
since it has to be distributed to some committees (e.g., the ESO-science &
technology committee) by Friday. Also, remember to send comments on
the draft ASAC report by TODAY.

Talk to you all tomorrow at the ASAC telecon at 14:15 UT,

With best wishes,

Ewine