[mmaimcal] FYI: July MONTHLY CALENDAR OF THE ALMA PROJECT at NRAO
Al Wootten
awootten at nrao.edu
Tue Jul 27 14:41:45 EDT 2010
Folks,
Corrections, contributions or clarifications? This should be dated June
but maybe no one will notice...
Thanks!
Clear skies,
Al
MONTHLY CALENDAR OF THE ALMA PROJECT at NRAO
July 2010
******************************** THIS MONTH *************************
ALMA Receives Its Tenth Antenna; Six Antennas at 5000m
On 8 July, antenna PM02 was moved from the 2900m altitude Operations
Support Facility (OSF) to the AOS, the second NAOJ antenna to make this
long trip. It joined four antennas already at the site—its sibling
PM02 had returned to the OSF for planned upgrades a few weeks earlier;
it will return to the AOS in August. Currently, DV04 joined its
siblings on July 26, maintaining the pace needed to meet the project
target of eight antennas at the AOS by the end of August. The twenty
eight baselines available between these antennas will offer a
marked improvement in ALMA’s imaging ability—with five antennas the
array provided ten baselines; imaging excellence increases
approximately as the square of antenna number. While essentially
all of the ALMA hardware is in place, the software that enables its
use is deployed in incremental stages at six month intervals.
Functionality of the hardware can only be fully tested according to
the ability of the software releases to accommodate the tests. A
new software release containing many new capabilities, was released
in June and installed on the array. A particular focus now is, of
course, the testing of capabilities which are scheduled for
availability during ALMA Early Science, expected next year.
The antennas are moved to the AOS after the antennas are provisionally
accepted and moved to the OSF, where it is outfitted with
electronics and put through exhaustive tests by the Assembly,
Integration and Verification (AIV) team. Four antennas are
currently undergoing tests there—recently DV08 became the tenth
ALMA antenna to begin the process after its 13 July move from
the contractor’s erection facility to its new ALMA home. After
outfitting and initial tests, the antennas at the OSF are combined
into a two element interferometer for final tests. This
interferometer also provides a staging platform for new software.
Software release 7.1 was recently rolled out, first to the OSF
interferometer, and then to the main array on the Chajnantor plain.
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Personnel Shifts
Rick Murowinski's appointment as Project Engineer came to an end on
June 30th; Rick has returned to his home instute, the Herzberg Institute
for Astrophysics.
East Asian Project Scientist Koh-ichiro Morita will move to the Joint
ALMA Observatory as System Verification Scientist from 1st August after
about three years in his present position. He will be succeeded as East
Asia Project Scintist by Masao Saito, who has served as ALMA-J Antenna
Lead, who brings significant experience in interferometric science,
having been a commissioning scientist in the SMA project. Hajime Ezawa
succeeds Saito as an antenna engineering scientist.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Government
In Congress, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the FY 2011
Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Bill. This bill, S. 3636,
provides funding for the National Science Foundation. Accompanying
this bill is Senate Report 111-229, which states that the Committee's
recommendation includes funding at the requested level for the Atacama
Large Millimeter Array [ALMA]. The equivlent House Subcommittee has
approved its version of this bill.
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Past issues of this Calendar may be viewed at
http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~awootten/mmaimcal/ALMACalendars.html
***************************************************************************
General Happenings
Photos of activity may be found at NRAO eNews:
http://science.nrao.edu/enews/
Sky: New moon occurs on 9 August. The Perseid meteor shower will
bejewel the dark night sky on 11 and 12 August. If you wish to focus
your views on the best time, watch at 1:00UT on Aug 13--meteors are
already appearing though and plenty will appear for North American
observers on Thursday night, Aug 12th through Friday morning. Venus,
Mars, Saturn and even Mercury light the evening sky; the triple
conjunction of the first three should be especially arresting. C/2009
R1 (McNaught) reached 5th magnitude rounding the Sun in July and will
reappear at 9th magnitude in southern hemisphere skies by late August;
it will never brighten northern skies again.
AOS: Six antennas are at the AOS with the early July arrival of PM02
and the late month arrival of DV04.
OSF: The tenth antenna, DV08, was received by ALMA (see above). Three
accepted antennas remain as of the end of July. A backup structure was
hoisted onto a mount to assemble a third AEM antenna in the contractor's
facility. Additional 7m antennas are due for shipment from Japan late
in the month; during the month the 15th Vertex antenna arrived at that
contractor's facility.
NAASC: An "Observing with ALMA" session will be held during the
Seattle AAS meeting. Immediately following, the Fifth NAASC Workshop
will highlight transformational science
enabled by modern high resolution wideband spectroscopy.
Pre-registration is open! See
http://www.almatelescope.ca/Spectroscopy2011/
'ALMA: Extending the Limits of Astrophysical Spectroscopy' will
be held Jan 15-17, 2011 in Victoria, B. C. after the 217th AAS
meeting 9-13 Jan 2011 in Seattle.
A review of the ALMA Operations proposal for 2012-2015 was held
by NSF in Chile in 2010 July.
***************************************************************************
DAILY CALENDAR (Times EDT/EST )
Oct 7-8 CSV Status Update Chile
Oct 11-12 SciOps Readiness Review Chile
Oct 25-28 Annual ALMA External Review Chile
Nov 10 Observatory Readiness Review Chile
Nov 16-18 ALMA Board Meeting Chile
******************************* TECHNICAL NEWS *************************
Several ALMA papers were presented at the 2010 SPIE meeting in San Diego.
*****************************ALSO OF INTEREST***************************
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Call for Proposals for Basic Science observations with the
Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is now open.
SOFIA recently completed its first science light flight 26 May. The
deadline for responding to the call is Friday, July 30, 2010.
Documents needed to consider observational possibilities and
constraints, and to prepare and submit observing proposals, can be found
at:
http://www.sofia.usra.edu/Science/proposals/basic_science
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CARMA
CARMA, the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy, is
accepting observing proposals for its 2011a semester, which will extend
from 1 November to 30 June 2011. The CARMA deadline is August 31.
See http://www.mmarray.org/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IRAM
A new CALL FOR PROPOSALS for IRAM telescopes is available at the web page:
http://www.iram.fr/GENERAL/calls/w10/w10.pdf
The deadline for proposal submission is 14 September at 17:00 CEST
(UT+2 hours); the proposal submission facility will be opened on 24
August, 2010. Please note that the deadline for submission of proposals
will *exceptionally be on Tuesday*, i.e. not the usual Thursday.
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Please send information for upcoming calendars by Friday evening of the
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