NORTH AMERICAN ALMA SCIENCE CENTER (NAASC)

The North American ALMA Science Center (NAASC) in Charlottesville, Virginia, is responsible for supporting the science use of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) by the North American astronomical community (the USA via the NRAO, and Canada via the National Research Council Canada), and for research and development activities in support of future upgrades of ALMA. The current schedule anticipates the first Call for Proposals for ALMA Early Science in late 2010, with the start of Early science in mid 2011. The NAASC is an operational division of within NRAO Headquarters, located in Charlottesville, VA on the campus of the University of Virginia.

The following is a partial list of the support users can expect from the NAASC:

• Organize ALMA meetings/workshops
• Travel to institutions to give talks on ALMA
• Support community Commissioning & Science Verification efforts
• One-stop shopping for submitting ALMA proposals (provide current information on ALMA observing modes and capabilities; support community use of Proposal Submission & Scheduling Tool; staff help desk; validate observers scheduling blocks)
• Post-observation user support (detailed examination of images delivered to or produced by users; re-reduce data for users; verify user-reported defects; staff help-desk; support user visits to NAASC for data reduction).
• Maintain ALMA websites, proposal guides, data reduction "cookbooks".

The NAASC is currently supporting the following scientific tools or projects in support of ALMA:

• CASA: the Common Astronomy Software Applications package, for the offline data reduction of ALMA data
• Obtaining CASA
• CASA training materials, script archives, and demos
• simdata: The CASA Simulator, which can be used to simulate ALMA observations
• Splatalogue: a database for astronomical spectroscopy
• SIS Mixer Development via the UVa Microfabrication Laboratories (UMVL)

• The ALMA Design Reference Science Plan (DSRP, rev 2.1)
  A community-generated prototype suite of high-priority ALMA projects that could be carried out in ~3-4 years of full ALMA operations. The DRSP serves as a quantitative reference for developing the science operations plan, for performing imaging simulations, for software design, and for other applications within the ALMA project.
• ALMA Science Simulations
• Past and current ALMA Memo Series
• Receiver Bands, Sensitivity & Resolution
• Resources for ALMA Flux Calibrators
• Travel to Chile (to be updated)

The North American ALMA Regional Center (NA ARC) is a subset of the NAASC, concentrating on the internationally agreed upon ALMA core functions (e.g. helpdesk support, telescope support in Chile, etc.). Each of the international partners has similar ARCs:

East Asian ARC at NAOJ European ARC at ESO European ARC Nodes

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The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.