[mmaimcal] 3/28/05 BIWEEKLY CALENDAR OF THE ALMA PROJECT at NRAO"

Mon Mar 28 17:30:21 EST 2005

Folks,

Omissions, inventions, and outright lies should be reported back to me asap.

Thanks,
Al

                        BIWEEKLY CALENDAR OF THE ALMA PROJECT at NRAO
                            March 28, 2005 -- April 11, 2005

******************************** THIS FORTNIGHT*********************************
A review of the ALMA Central Variable Reference will be held 29 March in
Charlottesville.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
A meeting of ALMA Executives will be held Monday, 4 April in Pasadena.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the ALMA Management Advisory Committee will meet,
also in Pasadena.  This will be followed on Thursday and Friday by a meeting
of the ALMA Board.  Saturday morning there will be a meeting of the bilateral
partners.  
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APEX should soon be into commissioning again. The VERTEX engineers 
are on Chajnantor for the final installations.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Past issues of this Calendar may be viewed at 
http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~awootten/mmaimcal/ALMACalendars.html
*******************************************************************************
General Happenings
Santiago: Most JAO and Chilean PMCS members were in Munich.

OSF: If this facility is tendered in April, as planned, provisional acceptance
would occur August 2007, followed by outfitting/instrumentation.  It was
decided that interferometry will occur at the OSF.

Tucson: Prototype tests continue.  

ATF: Post-fast switching antenna measurements underway.  First fringes now
not expected until early 2006.  First ALMA Frontend may be delivered to
System Integration May 2006 (hopefully earlier).

ESO:  Members of the JAO met with IPT leaders in Garching to assess the
ALMA rebaselining efforts.  35 Action Items were allocated and 5 Decisions
were recorded.  Among these were an ALMA spares policy and a decision to
equip a Front End Integration Center at the OSF.  The next meeting will 
be at the OSF during the last ten days of September.

*******************************************************************************
DAILY CALENDAR (Times EST )
Mon  28 March 	
9:30 AM-10:30 AM: NA Project Office Staff Meeting
 Tue 29 March 	
 4:00 PM-5:00PM: NAScienceIPT teleconference (open to all interested 
                                 parties) (434)296-7082
             Agenda: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~awootten/mmaimcal/ 
 Wed 30 	
 Thu 31 	
9:30 AM-11:00 AM: Management IPT Teleconference
 Fri 01 April	
 Sat 02 	
 Sun 03 	
 Mon 04 	
10:00 AM-11:00 AM: Normal ASAC Teleconference postponed one week to 12 Apr.
9:30 AM-10:30 AM: NA Project Office Staff Meeting
10:30 AM-11:30 AM: JAO IPT Telecon
11:30 AM-12:30 PM: NA DH telecon
 Tue 05 	
All day event: AMAC Meeting
 4:00 PM-5:00PM: NAScienceIPT teleconference (Imaging Group telecon).
 Wed 06 	
8:00 AM-4:00 PM: AMAC Meeting
2:00 PM-6:00 PM: ALMA Board Meeting
4:00 PM-6:00 PM: Joint Board/AMAC Meeting
 Thu 07 	
All day event: ALMA Board Meeting
9:30 AM-11:00 AM: Management IPT Teleconference
 Fri 08 	
8:00 AM-2:15 PM: ALMA Board Meeting
5:52 PM-6:46 PM: East Coast Partial Solar Eclipse; mid eclipse is 6:20 p.m. 
         (Virginia times) Wear Eye Protection!
 Sat 09 	
 Sun 10 	
****************************** UPCOMING EVENTS ******************************
ALMA Calendar--see also https://wiki.nrao.edu/bin/view/ALMA/NAASC

    * 29 March 2005 -- Central Variable Reference review, Charlottesville
    * 4 April -- Executive meeting, Pasadena
    * 5-6 April 2005 -- AMAC Face-to-face meeting, Pasadena, CA.
    * 7-8 April 2005 -- ALMA Board Face-to-face meeting, Pasadena, CA.
    * 9 April 2005 -- Bilateral project meeting
    * 4-5 May 2005 -- WVR PDR, OSO, Gothenburg, Sweden
    * 30 May - 10 June -- PDRs for ACA Correlator, B4, B8 may occur in Tokyo.
******************************* TECHNICAL NEWS *******************************
ALMA Memo # 519 An alternative scheme of round-trip phase correction 
by Hitoshi KIUCHI (NAOJ), Masoto ISHIGURO (NAOJ)
2005-02-18

In photonic LO (Local) system, a two-wavelength optical beatnote is 
transmitted by optical fiber from the AOS technical building to antennas.  
At an antenna, a photo mixer converts the optical beatnote into a 
microwave-signal which works as a reference signal for the Worm Multiplier 
Assembly (WMA).  The compensation of instability of transmission line is 
essential for interferometer to obtain fringes, and is an indispensable 
process for keeping signal coherence.  However, it is delicate to measure 
an optical cable length delay, because the measured delay includes 
polarization mode dispersion (PMD).  In order to accomplish the phase 
compensation on the optical fiber, we consider a double-difference method 
with a polarization alignment servo system.

In a few days, you will be able to view a pdf version of ALMA Memo #519:
http://www.alma.nrao.edu/memos/html-memos/alma519/memo519.pdf 
*******************************ALSO OF INTEREST*******************************
ALMA: Imaging at the Outer Limits of Radio Astronomy
Contribution to IEEE ICASSP meeting, Philadelphia (Conf CD in library ER)
by Al Wootten and Darrel Emerson

The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA)
is an international telescope project currently under construction in
Northern Chile.  Antennas arrayed over baselines up to 18 km in extent
will constitute over 7000 m$^2$ of collecting area, enabling ALMA to provide
images of unprecedented clarity and detail.  Unlike existing radioastronomical
arrays, ALMA will combine interferometric and single telescope
data, providing a complete range of spatial scales with complete
flux recovery.  Six of a planned ten planned receiver
bands will be built during the construction phase; eventually ALMA will
cover all atmospheric windows in the spectral wavelength range from 7mm
to 0.3 mm.  The combination of
sensitivity, directivity, full UV coverage from the large number of individual
antenna elements, precision calibration and the breadth of coverage, along
with the extremely dry Chajnantor site at 16500 feet, will enable the creation
of superb images of the celestial structures which emit millimeter and
submillimeter photons, the most abundant photons in the Universe.  Special
equipment will continuously monitor atmospheric parameters, in particular
the water vapor content along the telescopes' line of site, to permit real
time correction of atmospheric perturbations to the observed wavefront. The
observer will have a range of sophisticated data analysis techniques to be
able to compensate for atmospheric and instrumental perturbations to the
raw data.

View a pdf version of ALMA at the ICASSP:
http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~awootten/mmaimcal/ALMAOuterLimits.pdf
******************************************************************************
Please send information for upcoming calendars by Friday evening of the
preceding biweekly period to Jennifer Neighbours or Al Wootten via e-mail 
(jneighbo at nrao.edu or awootten at nrao.edu).

The calendar will be issued between late Friday and sometime on Monday by e-mail
to all NRAO scientific staff members and anyone else interested. A specific
mailing list, alma-info, has been created for anyone wishing to receive it.  
Past issues are available at 
http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~awootten/mmaimcal/ALMACalendars.html