ALMA Science Advisory Committee

Teleconference, 6 March 2002

Draft Minutes

Participants: R. Bachiller, G. Blake, R. Brown, P. Cox, R. Crutcher, N. Evans, S. Guilloteau, M. Gurwell, T. Hasegawa, R. Lucas, J. Mangum, L. Mundy, M. Rafal, J. Richer, P. Schilke, P. Shaver, M. Walmsley, D. Wilner, C. Wilson, A. Wootten, S. Yamamoto, M. Yun

The proposed agenda was adopted, and the minutes of the previous meeting were accepted.

(1)The Status Report: Bob Brown reported that there are real drafts for plan construction and ALMA Agreement which will be read for the ACC meeting in Venice in April. Some points have to be cleared out but all looks OK. The project plan is sensible with tasks well divided and the funding scehdule will be met.

Dick Kurz mentioned upcoming meeting: a Correlator meeting (26/27 March in Garching) with participation from EU (Baudry and Boss), N.A. and Japan. There will be an ALMA week end of April (in Grenada) with various splinter sessions and PDRs. Such clustered meetings will be planned twice a year to avoid unnecessary travels. The schedule of the Grenada meeting (Jaap Baars is in charge) will be sent around within a week.

(2) The second point on the agenda was a discussion on the agenda of the upcoming face-to-face meeting. The agenda was briefly discussed. I suggested to add `Science Operations Center' after the more general software issues (cf ties with the RSC). Otherwise the agenda was accepted as such. We note that we do not have many volunteers for the panel discussion during the Science Day. To my knowledge only Ewine replied positively. Some ASAC members will not attend (C. Wilson, A. Benz). It would be good to have a list of those attending by the way!

J. Richer asked a question if we should rediscuss the `Incentives' issue which was raised by Bob Brown during the Chile face-to-face meeting. The response was that we already discussed this in some detail in Chile. There was no particular need or urgency to bring this up in Tokyo. We agreed to have documents/reports ready before the face-to-face meeting on: Receivers (Wolfgang), AIPS++ test results (Stephane) and operations (Neal and the operations working group). These will be sent by the middle of next week. Other relevant material and documents will be made available by Al and documents relevant to progress in Japan will also be made available before the meeting.

(3) Al read the ASAC Charge which describes the relations between the ACC and the ASAC. We noted that`Project Scientist' was in singular. This reflects the fact that it was discussed at the same time as the Management Plan (where the PS is head of the Science IPT). Currently, Stephane is the PS. .

(4)Finally the next teleconference is planned for April 3 at 14:30 UT.