From awootten at nrao.edu Tue Jun 1 20:21:37 2010 From: awootten at nrao.edu (Alwyn Wootten) Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2010 20:21:37 -0400 Subject: [asac] Liaisons Message-ID: <66c29cc38087ceb72bafec4deb011a80.squirrel@webmail.cv.nrao.edu> Folks Please associate your name with a liaison area. See: https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/ALMA/AsacLiaison Clear skies, Al From rhills at alma.cl Wed Jun 2 06:20:32 2010 From: rhills at alma.cl (Richard Hills) Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:20:32 +0000 Subject: [asac] Liaisons In-Reply-To: <66c29cc38087ceb72bafec4deb011a80.squirrel@webmail.cv.nrao.edu> References: <66c29cc38087ceb72bafec4deb011a80.squirrel@webmail.cv.nrao.edu> Message-ID: <4C063070.6030102@alma.cl> Dear ASAC, I did discuss this with my colleagues in Chile after the last telecon and I am sorry that it has taken so long to get back to you to explain the outcome, but I have been distracted by a family problem. I fear that all this is not quite as straight-forward as we imagined during the telecon. As you know ALMA is subjected to a great deal of review and oversight - there is the Annual External Review (which is presently carrying out a 6-month check-up to fill any gaps) as well as the various panels looking at specific areas and of course any number of reviews of individual subsystems and components. The role of ASAC is to provide advice to the Board and the Project on *scientific* matters. It is absolutely right that the committee needs to be well informed about the state of the project in order to be able to give such advice, but we do need to be careful that the quest for such information does not turn into another layer of oversight on the day to day running of the project. The feeling was that proposed liaison mechanism was going too far down this road. So the suggestion is that we proceed along the following lines: As far as the Commissioning is concerned ASAC nominates some additional members to "standing" review panel - presently Bob Wilson, Nario Kuno, Peter Schilke and Melvyn Wright. I would suggest one more from each of the partners. At the moment this meets by telecon (14:00 UTC on the third Friday of each month) and will have a face to face meeting on 8/9th Oct here in Chile. For the "Operations Preparations" there is a similar small panel channel chaired by George Helou which will be meeting on 11th and 12th Oct. Again I suggest that ASAC nominates three additional members, one from each partner, to that. Please talk to Lars-Ake about the details of that. He will be able to provide the links to give information about the current activities. I also think that it is a good idea to have an ASAC member identified as the laison to each of the ARC's. Obviously that needs to be discussed with the ARC managers and I haven't had a chance to tell them about this yet. For the other areas, which are more focussed on particular parts of the system, the suggestion is that we will continue to provide you with the monthly reports, which do in fact contain a great deal of detail about progress and problems in all areas. If you have questions or want to follow up on specific topics then we will be happy to respond, but we would like to route this through people who have the full picture, rather than bothering the front-line managers, engineers and scientists. So please send these requests to me in the case of construction and technical items and to Lars-Ake if they relate to operations, user-interactions, etc. The latest reports are at http://www.alma.cl/~science/docs/10_Management/Monthly_reports/ALMA%20Report%202010%2003.pdf http://www.alma.cl/~science/docs/10_Management/Monthly_reports/ALMA%20Report%202010%2004.pdf I hope that this message will not get you, the ASAC members, too upset. Having been on lots of such bodies myself, I know only too well that the thing that really makes external committees frustrated is the feeling that they are being kept in the dark. I hope that you can accept that what is proposed here is a reasonable balance between making sure that you really are fully informed while enabling the management to get on with the day to day running the Project, for which of course they are accountable to the Board. Best Richard -- ******************************************************************* Richard Hills Phone: +56 2 467 6175 ALMA Project Scientist Fax: +56 2 467 6104 Av El Golf 40, Piso 18 Apmnt: +56 2 474 1642 Santiago, Chile Mobile +56 97 608 1582 ******************************************************************* From awootten at nrao.edu Sat Jun 5 07:56:31 2010 From: awootten at nrao.edu (Al Wootten) Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2010 07:56:31 -0400 Subject: [asac] ALMA at five antennas Message-ID: <4C0A3B6F.5070408@nrao.edu> Dear All Wow is it beautiful!! Congratulations to all the ALMA personnel who have worked to get the array to this stage! http://science.nrao.edu/images/alma5ant.png From this morning's AIV agenda--photo taken by Nick Whyborn 3 June 2010. I'm downloading *10* baseline data now... Clear skies, Al