ALMA

• ALMA Community Day
• Construction Progress in Chile
• The European Science Advisory Committee
• ALMA People
• New Personnel
• Upcoming events

A major event has been the ALMA Community Day, held at ESO Garching 2004 September 24. There were more than 130 participants. This event was sponsored by ESO and RADIONET. Members of the European Science Advisory Committee (ESAC) actively participated in the organization of the Workshop and most were able to attend. The morning session opened with a greeting by the Director General. Then there was a review of the ALMA project by the Joint ALMA Office Director Massimo Tarenghi. This was followed a series of presentations on current scientific topics and how ALMA can further progress in these areas. These science presentations consisted of five longer and 6 shorter talks. After the lunch break there were 4 longer talks about the plans for ALMA computing (from the users point of view), early science observing, and the ESO plans for the ALMA Regional Center in terms of user support and science support. The meeting ended with a one hour discussion involving all of the participants. The presentations at the Community Day have been collected and placed on the following website: http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/alma/meetings/gar-sep04/. The next ALMA community day is planned for autumn 2005.

The OSF site lies at an altitude of 2900m, with an amazing view over the giant Salar de Atacama. Currently, about 50 people are working at the OSF, housed in temporary containers. The three buildings on the right are the dormitories. The large hall in the back houses the offices. There is also a canteen, and even a barbecue on site. Special care is being taken to avoid changing the local fauna, and to limit light and water pollution .

The winding road connecting the OSF (3000m) to the AOS (5000m) passes an area between 3500m and 3800m dominated by large cacti (Echinopsis Atacamensis). These cacti grow on average 1cm per year, and reach heights of up to 9m.

The new provisional Santiago ALMA offices are located on the 18th floor of one of the most modern buildings of Santiago in El Golf.

The European ALMA Science Advisory Committee (ESAC) was established to provide advice on scientific matters to ESO. A portion of the membership of ESAC makes up the membership of the ALMA Science Advisory Committee (ASAC), which provides advice to the ALMA Board. The ALMA Board is the governing body of the project. The ESAC members should also provide information from the project, and collect advice from astronomers in their home countries. There is one ESAC member from earch member state of ESO and also from Spain, which is a partner in the ALMA project. The members of ESAC are:

In the First issue, we presented only profiles of new hires. We have decided to expand our presentations to the entire staff. In each issue, we shall introduce 3 to 5 staff members working at ESO Garching or at the Joint ALMA Office (JAO) in Chile.

Massimo Tarenghi is the ALMA director. He became an ESO fellow in 1977 and has been an International Staff Member of ESO since 1979. He was the Project Manager of the ESO New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile between 1973 and 1991, becoming Head of Coordination and Control for the Very Large Telescope in 1988. In the period 1985 to 1988 he was full professor of astrophysics at the university of Milano. Appointed VLT Programme Scientist in January 1991, he became VLT Programme Manager/Head of VLT Division in November of that year. In June 2002 he became the ALMA interim Project Manager, since April 2003 he is the ALMA director. His scientific interests include clusters of galaxies, large scale distribution, and active nuclei.

Tom Wilson has been the ALMA European Project Scientist at ESO since January 2004. He is on leave from the position of a senior scientist (C3) at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie in Bonn. He was director of the Sub-mm Telescope Observatory on Mt. Graham AZ, USA from 1997 to 2002. He has written a text book, 'Tools of Radio Astronomy', now in the 4th edition, with K. Rohlfs, and the accompanying problem book with S. Huettemeister. His scientific interests include high mass star formation, isotopic ratios in the ISM and molecular spectroscopy.

Robert Laing has been the ALMA European Instrument Scientist since November 2003. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, gaining his PhD in Radio Astronomy in 1980. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Charlottesville for three years, before returning to the UK to take a staff position at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. When the RGO closed, he took up a joint position at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (Head of Astrophysics Research) and the University of Oxford (Professor of Astrophysics). His research interests are in the physics of active galactic nuclei (especially relativistic jets) and extragalactic magnetic fields. He has considerable experience in aperture synthesis techniques, as a user of the VLA, MERLIN, Ryle Telescope and VLBI arrays. While at RGO, he also worked extensively on the commissioning of optical/IR telescopes and instruments, and was project scientist for the Isaac Newton and William Herschel Telescopes on La Palma.

Pascal Martinez joined the ALMA Antenna IPT in June 2004 where he supports Stefano Stanghellini (Antenna IPT leader) in the technical activities related to the ALMA prototypes antennas and the production of the antennas. Pascal comes from the Space industry where he has been involved in different commercial and scientific programs for Alcatel Space in Toulouse (France), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (USA), and the Guiana Space Center for the Ariane 4 & 5 launchers in Kourou (French Guiana). He has worked in the last two years on the manufacturing, assembly and testing of the European ALMA antenna prototype with Alcatel, following the project from Italy to the VLA site.

Ferdinand Patt started in August 2004 at ESO as the ALMA Front End (FE) Sub-system Production Engineer. He is part of the FE IPT and will be responsible for the engineering and monitoring of production contracts for the FE instrumentation. His tasks will include the management, both technical and programmatic, of individual work packages for the FE sub-system and of the related production contracts. Ferdinand comes from the beautiful Islands of Hawaii where he was working for ASIAA in collaboration with the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics on the finish of the Submillimeter Array, as a Senior Microwave Engineer. His duties for ASIAA did also include tasks for the AMiBA project. He was the main contact for the site development and the photonic calibration system. Prior to this, he worked for NRAO on the ALMA evaluation front-end subsystems Band 3 and 6.

Donald Tait started with ESO in August 2004. Previously he was working as the planning coordinator for BAE Systems, and partner companies, on the Eurofighter Aircrew Synthetic Training Aids; known as ASTA. The ASTA programme is a billion Euro, quadra-national company that like ALMA also begins and ends in A. Prior to ASTA he worked in a number of roles within BAE Systems, including Reliability Analyst at Airbus, Maintainability Systems Engineer & Cockpit Designer on the Nimrod programme and Human Factor specialist for ground based electronic warfare data systems. Donald is on secondment from his home site of Preston in the north of England. Within ALMA he will be working for ESO as part of the PMCS team supporting IPT, Executive and JAO managers in all manner of project planning activities. While based in Garching, he will be on the road extensively both in Europe and North America meeting face to face with colleagues and counterparts across the project.

Fourth IRAM Millimeter Interferometry School 2004
22-27 November 2004, Grenoble

IAU Symposium 227 Massive Star Birth: A Crossroads of Astrophysics
16-20 May 2005, Acireale, Italy
Deadline for registration is 31 December 2004