ESO ALMA Regional Centre

The European ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) has the responsibility of providing scientific user support to the ESO community. This support will be in the areas of proposal preparation, observation preparation, data reduction, and data analysis. The European ARC is organized as a coordinated network of scientific support nodes. The central node is located at ESO Headquarters in Garching bei München.

Organisation

Science interface between the ALMA project and the user communities will be conducted by the three ALMA Regional Centres (ARCs), in Europe, North America and East Asia. The European ARC is part of ESO's Data Management Operations Division (DMO) and serves as the access portal to ALMA for the European user community. In synergy with the distributed network of ARC nodes, the centre's aim is to optimise ALMA's science output and to fully exploit this unique and powerful facility. The EU ARC will be the point of contact for European ALMA users from the moment of proposal submission to the actual distribution of calibrated data and subsequent analysis.

The diagram on the right shows the European ARC structure, with the ESO central node and the satellite nodes in Europe.

The European ARC has counterparts in North America and Japan

Activities

The core of the ARC activities consists of: assisting the user community with the technical preparation of observing proposals, ensuring that the observing programs are compliant with the requirements set by their scientific goals and make an efficient use of the facility, running a help-desk for the proposal submission and submission of observing programs, delivering the data to principal investigators, maintening and refining of the ALMA data archive, providing feedback to the data reduction pipeline and the off-line reduction software systems. A more detailed discription can be found at the ARC Activities.

The relationship between the user, the ARC, and the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) in Chile, is schematically shown in the figure on the left. Proposals and observing files are sent from the ARCs to the Joint ALMA Office (JAO) in Santiago. Data are sent from the observatory to the JAO and further onto the ARCs, with complete copies of the ALMA archive at all four locations.

Contact

The ARC at ESO is located at the ESO headquarters. See contact details for a map of the area.