BIWEEKLY CALENDAR OF THE ALMA PROJECT at NRAO August 1, 2005 -- August 14, 2005 ******************************** THIS FORTNIGHT***************************** On Monday evening, August 1st, the first two contracts - of the corresponding first two phases - of the Array Operations Site Technical Building were signed with Con-Pax, a Chilean construction company. These contracts are to construct the building's foundations and shell. Mobilization by Con-Pax has already started and ground breaking will be around the first week of September. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ALMA EDM: New EDM person has started in Santiago - Carolina Lizama. Carolina will be managing EDM in the future. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The September face-to-face meeting of the JAO with the IPT leads has been cancelled owing to accelerated schedule for the ALMA Cost Review. ALMA-J confirms they will shift the date for their ACA system review to Nov 10-11, in Japan. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Past issues of this Calendar may be viewed at http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~awootten/mmaimcal/ALMACalendars.html See also the ALMA Calendar overview at: https://wikio.nrao.edu/bin/view/ALMA/AlmaCalendar or http://www.alma.cl/alma_project ******************************************************************************* General Happenings Santiago: Activities include rebaselining, updating phonebook, Quarterly Report generation. OSF: Provisional Acceptance of the extension of the ALMA camp to 30 bed capacity will now be in August 2005. The camp is meanwhile fully occupied by road maintenance and construction crews. Construction work for the establishment of the modified formation level of the permanent access road from km 28 to the AOS has started on 07-Jul-2005. Rough Work is in progress at km 33. Currently there are approximately 60 persons working at the site AOS: Construction on AOS Technical Building to start 2005-Sept-20. The Science team has removed old pad location stakes and scouted the locations for the new configuration, providing instant feedback to Conway on unsuitable locations with recommendations for new ones. Old NRAO container battery complement removed, new batteries installed. Radiosonde campaign underway; 9 Aug launched 8 times from 2 sites: 4 from 5000m (Chajnantor) and 4 from 4500m. Tucson: Emerson is writing report from System Requirements Review. Chris Groppi is visiting the AOC PSI (Prototype System Integration) group at the AOC; they have assembled and tested the RF simulator rack, and integrated it with the other backend racks in the AOC lab. They then performed many phase drift tests of backend modules, which gave very promising results. Work is continuing on measuring end-to-end phase drift up to the 1st LO drivers. Nutator science requirements have reached convergence and technical specifications are proceeding under guidance of Nick Emerson in Tucson. AOC: Socorro meeting on pipeline matters held. Socorro meeting for data capture, science data model, and other matters also held. Two digitizer pairs received from UofB are being evaluated. The FE Simulator has been moved to Socorro from Tucson and returned to working order. NTC: It has been recommended to the project that the original plan of two independent integration centers be implemented. Band 3 (3mm): The first 2SB mixer assembly for Cartridge #2 shows <37K noise; New gain compression measurements of B3 Cartridge #1 were made, showing <0.8% across the band. All B6 (1mm) SIS mixer wafers have been delivered by UVA, and evaluation of the last 3 is in progress. Assembly of B6 Cartridge #3 began. Development of Line Length Corrector is proceeding in Charlottesville. Installation of the final cables in the correlator first quadrant was completed. NAASC: A review of the amplitude calibration device will be held on 25th August at IRAM in Grenoble. The review is a joint activity of the Science IPT and FE IPT and will be chaired by Jeff Mangum. ASAC meeting was held 3 August; draft minutes posted at website. zMachine Workshop speakers 16/18 lined up, announcement to go out to 1600-name ALMA list on 15 August. Antenna goretex window discussion was moderated by Wootten, who has gathered information onto a wiki page at https://wikio.nrao.edu/bin/view/ALMA/RfMembrane and has begun updating Scientific Requirements for the membrane. ******************************************************************************* DAILY CALENDAR (Times EDT ) see https://wikio.nrao.edu/bin/view/ALMA/AlmaCalendar Mon 1 August Tue 2 10:30 AM-11:30 AM: JAO IPT Telecon Wed 3 2:00 PM: ALMA NA Telecaucus Thu 4 11:00 AM: ALMA Board Telecon Fri 5: 11:00 AM: CCB Telecon Sat 6 Sun 7 Mon August 8 Tue 9 10:30 AM-11:30 AM: JAO IPT Telecon 11:30 AM-12:30 PM: Nutator Telecon 4:00 PM-5:00 PM: NAScienceIPT teleconference Agenda: https://wikio.nrao.edu/bin/view/ALMA/9Aug05A Wed 10 11:00 AM-12:00 PM: ALMA Science Software Requirements Telecon Thu 11 11:00 AM-12:00 PM: ALMA Calibration Telecon Fri 12 Sat 13 Sun 14 ****************************** UPCOMING EVENTS ****************************** New! ALMA-JAO Calendar http://www.alma.cl/alma_project * Aug 25 -- Amplitude Calibration Review, Grenoble * Aug 26 -- ANASAC Telecon * Aug 29 -- Antenna meeting, Kilgore, Tx * Sep 14 -- ESAC Meeting, Garching * Sep 15 -- European ALMA Board, Garching * Sep 22-23 -- ACA System Review, Santiago Postponed, probably to Early Nov, Tokyo * Sep 24-30 -- JAO/IPT Meeting, OSF Postponed, probably to early Dec. * Sep 29-30 -- ESO Committee of Council * Oct 1-2 -- ASAC Meeting, Santiago * Oct 6 -- Rolling Stones come to Scott Stadium, Charlottesville * Oct 13-16 -- ALMA Cost Review proposed, Munich * Nov 1-2 -- ALMA Board, Santiago * Nov 8-9 -- ESO Finance Committee * Dec 7-8 -- ESO Council Regular Meeting * Jan 4-7 -- URSI/NA, Boulder * Jan 12-14 -- ALMA Zmachines workshop ******************************* TECHNICAL NEWS************************ ******************************ALSO OF INTEREST******************************* SMA CALL FOR PROPOSALS Deadline: 13 September 2005 The Submillimeter Array (SMA), the radio interferometer on Mauna Kea built by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, makes available a fraction of the observing time to principal investigators from the astronomical community (worldwide). The proposal deadline is 13 September 2005 for the observing semester 1 November 2005 through 30 April 2006. More information, technical details, and instructions and tools for proposal preparation and submission can be found at http://sma1.sma.hawaii.edu/, the SMA Observer Center web site. *** FCRAO 14 METER TELESCOPE PROPOSALS Deadline: 15 September 2005 The Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory solicits proposals for observations with the FCRAO 14 meter telescope. The deadline for proposal submission is 15 September 2005. The telescope is equipped with a 32 element focal plane array receiver (SEQUOIA) which is comprised of low noise MMIC amplifiers with SSB receiver noise temperatures of 60 K. The autocorrelation spectrometer system enables the observation of two spectral lines within 85-100 GHz or 100-115 GHz bands simultaneously. On the Fly mapping is now the standard observing mode which allows more efficient imaging of the millimeter sky. More detailed information of FCRAO and proposal instructions are available at http://www.astro.umass.edu/~fcrao/observer/. Further questions can be addressed to Mark Heyer, mailto:heyer@astro.umass.edu. *************************************************************************** Please send information for upcoming calendars by Friday evening of the preceding biweekly period to Jennifer Neighbours or Al Wootten via e-mail (jneighbo@nrao.edu or awootten@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