From rhills at alma.cl Fri Mar 4 19:13:03 2011 From: rhills at alma.cl (Richard Hills) Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2011 00:13:03 +0000 Subject: [asac] Capabilities for Cycle 0 Message-ID: <4D71800F.2010706@alma.cl> Dear All, First thank you all very much for your most helpful advice and careful analysis on this topic at the meeting and especially for getting a preview of your report to us so quickly. That was splendidly clear and well argued. We have had a further thorough review of the topic and looked again at the practicalities. Attached is the summary of the outcome of that. You will see that we concluded that it was not realistic to offer polarization without having demonstrated that it was in a state for the community to use, but that did feel that it was OK to go ahead with mosaics and that this will be a valuable capability for this first cycle. We also realised that the limitations associated with the temporary power system are not a restriction for baselines of up to nearly 500 meters. Those foundations are all expected to be ready in the next couple of months. (I am sorry for not explaining this more clearly at the meeting. In retrospect it was a mistake to concentrate on the 750 meter option at the meeting.) There are good configurations available with maximum baselines of around 400 meters and this size has a number of advantages, including providing close to arc-second resolution in Band 3 and below 0.5 arcsecond resolution at band 7. We therefore decided that this was a good choice for the maximum array size. Do please get back to me if you have any questions. Best Richard -- ******************************************************************* Richard Hills Phone: +56 2 467 6175 ALMA Project Scientist Mobile +56 97 608 1582 Alonso de Cordova 3107 Apmnt: +56 2 474 1642 Vitacura 763 0355 Fax: +56 2 467 6104 Santiago de Chile www.almaobservatory.org ******************************************************************* -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Cycle 0 capabilities.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 74289 bytes Desc: not available URL: