MMA Imaging and Calibration Group

Agenda for meeting Tuesday, 18 Jul 2000 at 4pm EDT.

Date: 18 Jul 2000

Time: 4:00 pm EDT (2:00 pm Socorro, 1:00 pm Tucson)

Phone: (804)296-7082 (CV SoundStation Premier Conference phone).

Past minutes, etc on MMA Imaging and Calibration Division Page

Minutes

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Report from Imaging and Calibration on June 2000 Work and News. -Wootten

Report from Imaging and Calibration on June 2000 Work

Wootten updated the ALMA powerpoint presentations, giving them at the Piedmont Virginia Technology Council, the U. of Florida and the Interferometry School in Socorro. He also worked on updating the brochure. Meetings of the ASAC were held, as well as the Configuration group, the SSR and the weekly ALMA/US Imaging and Calibration Group. He wrote summary of ALG issues for the ASAC, as well as a response to the JRDG proposed receiver specifications and the SSR queries. Wootten visited A. Harris and others at U. Md. to familiarize himself with BIMA developments, and with progress of the water vapor radiometry efforts within the MDC. He also visited the AOC, where the ImCal meeting was held, as well as discussions with Cornwell and others on AIPS++ and ALMA.

Development of a calibration plan continued, the plan to be presented shortly. Mangum continued to investigate the amplitude calibration problem, along with Dick Plambeck of the JRDG. They will shortly present a calibration method which should allow ALMA to approach the 1% amplitude calibration specification suggested by the ASAC. He also continued to work on pointing requirements for the ALMA antenna, including further testing of optical pointing on the NRAO 12m antenna. He also attended the Vertex antenna PDR in Duisburg, Germany as representative of the Calibration and Imaging Group.

Site activities continued, despite the winter months in Chile. Radford visited the Chajnantor site to upgrade, repair and replace equipment. No data exist on the atmospheric structure during the southern hemisphere winter, so six radiosondes were launched, on various days. Owing to a shortage of parts, the ALMA/US interferometer is now running with the ALMA/EU 183 GHz radiometers, with which they are aligned. He also attended the Cornell-Texas workshop on a 15m infrared telescope for the Atacama site. In Tucson, Radford worked on updating the ALMA atmospheric statistics with new data from Chajnantor, the nutator design, and refined site position information from GPS. Radford completed Memo 312, Refined Position of ALMA Equipment on Chajnantor, and Memo 314, Underground Temperature Fluctuations and Water Drainage at Chajnantor.

Butler gave a presentation on planetary aspects of interferometric imaging to the summer school in Socorro. He continued processing atmospheric data through atmospheric models, including the radiosonde data. Butler also is finishing a memo on the possible location of the Compact Array.

Configuration efforts also are approaching a final state. Yun updated the Project Book Chapter 15 and finished a complete design report for the donut/double ring ALMA configuration, as well as producing a WEB page for the simulation image library for the configuration study, complete with the links to the FITS format test images. Conway reports nearing a final design for his zoom array concept, also, and at the configuration meeting this month the process of simulating observations with the two designs was discussed, the process to begin shortly. Yun gave a presentation on "ALMA Science Issues" to the NRAO User Committee and attended the Deep Millimeter Surveys conference at U Mass. There, he presented a talk on using the whole radio to dust SED to infer the redshifts. He reports that there is a growing realization that, of instruments to be built capable of imaging the deep millimeter sky over the next few years, only ALMA has the resolution to overcome confusion. Yun then moved on towards production of a resolution of issues surrounding the Ultracompact Array. He compared using the UVCON program in AIPS, updated by Kogan to include simulation of the impact of pointing errors on imaging, to examine the performance of an array of 6m and 12m telescopes.

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Compact Array

See Stephane's comments on the ACA and also Morita's work through March.

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Action Items 18 Jul2000

DECISION: Configurations--where are we? Next phone meeting plans...ACA/THzA?

DECISION: Implementation of 183 GHz WVR?

DECISION: Are the specs for a nutating secondary correct?

DECISION: What is the total power specification on the ALMA?

DECISION: What is the effect of 1/f noise in the HEMT amplifiers of SIS receivers upon our ability to combine total power and interferometric images into a faithful representation of the sky?

Year 2000

January	February	March	April
May	June	July	August
September	October	November	December

May, 1-2	Site Development Discussions	Garching, Germany
May 15-17	Test Interferometer Planning	Tucson, Arizona

Jun, 12-16	2nd IRAM Millimeter Interferometry Summer School	IRAM Grenoble, France
June 19-20	Vertex Antenna PDR	Duisburg, Germany
Jun, 20-27	7th Synthesis Imaging Summer School	Socorro, USA
June 21-22	EIE Antenna PDR	Venice, Italy

October 13

ACC Meeting

Paris, France

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Travel

AW -> Socorro 20-25 May 2000 ------