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OATS-UNI/TS SEMINAR
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Speaker: Jan Brand (IRA/INAF, BO, I)
Title: ALMA and the Italian ALMA Regional Centre
Date: Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
Time: 12:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni
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Abstract:
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submilliter Array (ALMA) is presently under
construction in the Atacama desert in Chile, at an altitude of 5000 m.
The project is a collaboration between Europe, North America (USA and
Canada), East Asia (Japan and Taiwan), and Chile.
The combination of a site with high atmospheric transparency, a vast
collecting area, a large range in frequencies (initially 84 - 950 GHz),
a large instantaneous bandwidth, and flexible backends, gives ALMA the
potential to make significant progress in many branches of astronomy.
The principal array consists of 54 12-m antennas, that can be arranged
in various configurations with maximum baselines ranging from 150 m to
18 km. In addition the ALMA Compact Array (ACA), consisting of 4 12-m
and 12 7-m antennas, provides the short-spacings, total power observations,
and wide-field imaging.
The first scientific observations with a partial array (accompanied by
a call for proposals) are foreseen to take place in 2011.
I will present an overview of the ALMA project, its present status, and
its operations. I will furthermore illustrate the infrastructure that the
participating partners are creating to provide user-support. In particular
I will describe the European contribution, with emphasis on the Italian
ALMA Regional Centre, the support centre we are currently setting up at
the Istituto di Radioastronomia.
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contact: Stefano Cristiani (OATS)