Subject: [Anasac] 3 new charges for the ANASAC From: Jonathan Williams Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 15:46:33 -1000 To: anasac@nrao.edu Dear ANASAC members, As you will have seen from an earlier message today, Chris Carilli asked me to chair the ANASAC for the coming year and I have agreed. Its an exciting time to be involved: construction is proceeding in Chile and antenna contracts have been signed but there is, as yet, no funding for North American ALMA operations. The NSF has requested a formal proposal by the end of September and the ANASAC will play an essential role in defining this. Chris has listed 3 charges that he would like us to address: CHARGE 1. User Grants program: the grants program is a recommended priority by the decadal committee. NRAO can act as an advocate for the community in this regard, but the real impetus must come from the community. The Grants should not be considered funding for NRAO, but should be considered funding for support for the community use of ALMA. Does the community want a grants-with-observing time program associated with ALMA? What is a reasonable starting amount for such a program? The number we have penciled-in is $10 M/year, which is about $1 per second observing time (similar to space missions). -- Can the ANASAC provide an endorsement letter for a grants program (if that is what you decide), with a rough description of the kind of grants program the user community would like to see, and possibly a guideline as to the amount? CHARGE 2. Community involvement in ALMA operations: The NSF has asked us to identify areas where ALMA operations funding could be spent outside of NRAO, ie. in the US University community. The obvious areas are (i) software development: this could include software to support new ALMA observing modes, or to take advantages of new computing hardware, or advanced analysis routines, such as complex, wide field spectral line analysis and visualization. (ii) hardware development: possibly new receiver bands or advanced WVRs (iii) educational activities: scientific meetings, students, and postdocs support -- Can the ANASAC make a set of recommendations as to where they think the Universities could best get involved with ALMA operations? CHARGE 3: A review of the North American ALMA operations funding proposal, prior to submission to the NSF. Community assessment of the proposal is an absolutely crucial task, and should make the proposal much stronger. Can the ANASAC review the draft NSF proposal, and provide a short assessment of the proposed North American ALMA operations funding plan? The ASAC members of the ANASAC will lead the response to Charge 3 as they have had the longest involvement with the project. I would like to form two other subcommittees to address the first two. Andrew Baker already began to address community involvement issues and has agreed to lead the response to Charge 2. I am asking for volunteers to collaborate with Andrew on this and for others to work on the response to Charge 1. Whereas in the past, the ANASAC has been by and large a passive recipient of information, we are now in a position to play a meaningful role in defining the way in which ALMA is integrated into the astronomical community. Please let me know if you can help out with this! I have attached a powerpoint and Word document of a report to the NRAO Users Committee that describes the organizational setup of North America ALMA operations and projected costs for operations. The next ANASAC telecon is on Friday June 30th and it would be great if the subcommittees were formed by then and starting to think about the issues. The goal is to have a draft of the NSF proposal by August 15th so we have less than 10 weeks to give our input. Best regards, Jonathan Williams ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonathan Williams email: jpw@ifa.hawaii.edu Institute for Astronomy phone: 808 956 8355 2680 Woodlawn Drive fax: 808 956 4604 Honolulu HI 96822 web: www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~jpw -------------------------------------------------------------------------