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European ALMA Newsletter
July 2005 - Fifth Edition - Download PDF here. This is the fifth edition of the quarterly European ALMA newsletter. The editors are Tom Wilson, Carlos De Breuck and Martin Zwaan (ESO). Contents: |
| Antenna procurement | |
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The antennas are the largest single item in the ALMA budget. Thus the status of antenna procurement is of the highest importance for the project. The present status of procurement is the following. |
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| Progress for the ALMA front ends | |
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In recent months the ALMA Front End Integrated Product Team (IPT) has shown several important signs of concrete progress towards the construction of receivers for the ALMA project. On 6th and 7th July 2005 the FE IPT successfully completed its delta Preliminary Design Review (PDR). The review meeting was held at ESO Headquarters in Garching bei München, Germany. The review panel, chaired by the European ALMA System Engineering & Integration IPT Lead, Christoph Haupt, consisted of experts both internal to the project as well as noted receiver experts from Australia and the USA. Based on documentation made available in preparation of the meeting and the presentations at the meeting the review panel came to a unanimous decision that the front end design was well beyond the PDR status. The reviewers also provided valuable constructive criticism that will be taken into account in finalizing the ALMA receiver design. The success of this design review was very much due to the joint efforts made by the FE IPT sub-system engineers, Hans Rudolf (ESO) and Kamaljeet Saini (NRAO), and the support they received from others within the FE IPT. | |
| That the ALMA FE IPT makes progress is also shown in a more tangible manner in that important assemblies are nearing the completion of their construction. At IRAM in Grenoble, France, the first pre-production unit of the Band 7 Cartridge, covering the frequency range from 275 GHz to 373 GHz, is currently undergoing extensive testing to both verify the design and this first unit itself. Noise measurements on the completed unit, using the 1st local oscillator delivered by NRAO, show exceptionally good performance with a large margin compared to the requirements (see figure on the right). | 
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The first Band 9 pre-production cartridge has also been completed (see figure on the left) and is undergoing extensive testing at NOVA/SRON in Groningen, The Netherlands. This testing is currently being done with IF amplifiers having a reduced bandwidth of 4 to 8 GHz. The final IF amplifiers, having the required bandwidth of 4 to 12 GHz, were recently delivered by Yebes Observatory in Spain and will be mounted in the Band 9 cartridge shortly. |
| In summary it can be stated that the receiver noise temperatures achieved on the Band 7 and 9 cartridges are likely the best in the world over these wide frequency bands in the sub-millimeter range. These achievements become even more remarkable when one takes into account that both Band 7 and 9 receivers use no mechanical tuning at all! Until recently this was standard practice to obtain the optimum noise performance. The combination of modern, state-of-the-art design technology, well equipped laboratories and last, but definitely not least, very skilled and dedicated staff at both IRAM and NOVA/SRON are the key to this success.(Contributed by Gie Han Tan) | |
| Construction progress | |
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| The excavations for the Operations Support Facility (OSF) buildings are now in full progress (see also ALMA newsletter 4). The two levels of the future building are now clearly discernable. In the meantime, construction of the road between the OSF and the Array Operations Site at 5000m has moved up to the higher and more difficult part of the road at an altitude of 4000m. Photo credits: Jörg Eschwey | |
| ALMA and Joint ALMA Office people | |
Hans Rykaczewski is the new European ALMA Project Manager and Head of the ESO ALMA Division. He studied physics in Aachen, after which he completed his doctoral thesis on experimental searches for new quark flavours at the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg. In 1984, he moved to M.I.T. and was delegated to CERN for working on the design and construction of the L3 detector which was installed and taking data at CERN's Large Electron Positron Collider LEP. There he was responsible for the timely fabrication of several subdetector elements, like magnet, calorimeter systems and the precision muon spectrometer. Since 1989 he was holding a position as Scientific Associate at the Laboratory for High Energy Physics of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich. He was intensively involved in many scientific and managerial issues concerning the L* Experiment at the Superconducting Super Collider SSC and the proposed L3P Experiment for the Large Hadron Collider LHC at CERN. Since the beginning of 1994, he took over important scientific, organisational and financial responsibilities for the CMS experiment. He was engaged in many areas of the construction of the lead-tungstate (PWO) crystal detector and was deeply involved in the organisation of the construction of the CMS Magnet. Hans Rykaczewski joined ESO in July 2005 and is very much looking forward to helping in making ALMA a success, especially in fruitful collaboration with the international partners in this trilateral project.
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Jörg Eschwey was born in 1940, in Altena, Westphalia, Germany. After graduation he worked for a number of years for a smaller and a larger construction firm in the Heidelberg/Mannheim area in Germany as construction manager on commercial and residential projects of various types and sizes. The successful completion of the new construction of the prestigious Helmholzgymnasium in Heidelberg stands out during this period. In 1968 he joined Mercedes Benz, Stuttgart, Germany as construction manager for new construction, modifications and maintenance of the firm's branches in the area of south-west Germany. Some larger projects including a factory for packaging materials and an extension of the Heidelberg Branch were completed successfully. In June 1973, Jörg joined ESO as site inspector/construction manager at the La Silla Observatory. The New Pelicano project, the Warehouse and Mechanical Workshops, the Astro- Workshop, some Dormitories, aspects of the 3.60 m Telescope the 2.30 m Telescope and some smaller telescopes were amongst the projects successfully completed by him. In 1981 Jörg left ESO due to family reasons and moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Here he worked for the Kraus-Anderson Construction Company. He served as project manager in charge on large projects including the Piper Jaffray Tower (47 floors) in downtown Minneapolis, the New Production Facility of the Minneapolis Star Tribune (more than 500,000 daily circulation) and the Austin Center 3M in Austin, Texas, Jörg's largest and most challenging project ever (US $ 120,000,000 in 19 months) all of which were completed successfully. In 1990 he re-joined ESO to serve as site manager on the Paranal Observatory, which was successfully completed in 2001. After a brief period as deputy director at the Paranal Observatory Jörg was transferred to ALMA in 2002 to serve as the head of the ALMA Site IPT.
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Stefano Stanghellini obtained his degree in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Bologna, Italy in 1981. He then joined the Water Reactor Division of Westinghouse Nuclear International, at the Brussels headquarters. There, he worked on structural mechanics issues related to nuclear reactors including primary and secondary cooling systems, and emergency systems of various nuclear power plants in Europe. In 1987 he joined Motoren und Turbinen Union in Munich, where he worked on airborne civilian jet engines, developed in collaboration with Pratt & Whitney and General Electric, with particular emphasis on structural strength and fatigue life of low pressure turbines. In 1990 he joined ESO in the Very Large Telescope Division. There he led the team in charge of the definition, the design and the industrial procurement of optomechanical subsystems of the 4 VLTs, like the primary mirror cells, the secondary units, the secondary beryllium mirrors and the tertiary mirror tower, all finally delivered at the Paranal Observatory. He also contributed to other subsytems including the primary and tertiary mirrors. With the creation of the Technical Division at ESO in 1998 he took responsibility of the Mechanical System Group. In summer 2000 he was loaned to the UK ATC, Edinburgh, to be the System Engineer for the 4m VISTA survey telescope. There he took an active role in the definition of the VISTA project, leading to its high level specification, the feasibility and the costing of the system, issues relevant for the negotiations for the entrance of the UK into ESO. In October 2001, after completion of the Phase A of VISTA, he returned to ESO, and took over the responsibility for the European ALMA Antenna Prototype, contracted to ALCATEL Space and European Industrial Engineering. After a first phase of review and update of the design existing at the time, he led the consortium to deliver the antenna in December 2004 at the Very Large Array site in Socorro New Mexico, after a first campaign of tests by ALMA staff. In August 2003 he became the Antenna IPT leader and led the preparation of the Call for Proposal for the procurement of the ALMA serial antennas. The Antenna IPT is currently responsible for the serial antennas and for their transporters.
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| PhD defence of front end group members | |
Recently, two key members of the Band 9 cartridge team at NOVA/SRON based in Groningen, The Netherlands, obtained their doctorate degrees.Andrey Barychev, mixer/receiver expert in the ALMA Band 9 cartridge team, did his defence on Wednesday, 9th March 2005. The subject of his PhD thesis was "Superconductor-Insulator-Superconductor THz Mixer Integrated with a Superconducting Flux-Flow Oscillator". Although the ALMA Band 9 receivers do not use this very advanced, integrated local oscillator, part of the presented research work was of direct advantage to the ALMA receiver development. The Work Package manager for the Band 9 cartridge, Brian Jackson, made his defence on Wednesday, 8th June 2005. His subject focused on sub-millimeter mixers and was titled "Nb TiN-Based THz SIS mixers for the Herschel Space Observatory". The actual research work for his thesis was completed before he took on the position as Band 9 cartridge WP manager. The Band 9 receiver development directly reaps of the fruits from this thesis research because Nb TiN SIS junctions are essential to obtaining low noise performance across this frequency band since they have a higher band gap frequency compared to Nb based junction used so far. | |
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Both PhDs were obtained at Delft Technical University, The Netherlands, where Prof. Dr. Ir. Teun M. Klapwijk acted as the supervisor. Prof. Klapwijk and his group also contribute in a more direct way to the ALMA Project since they are developing and delivering the SIS junctions for the Band 9 receivers. The outstanding performance of the Band 9 receivers using "his" junctions is reported elsewhere in this Newsletter.
Well known members of the, astronomical, sub-millimeter community were present in both PhD committee's, including Prof. Ewine van Dishoeck of Leiden University, Leiden in The Netherlands, Prof. Dr. Victor Belitsky of Chalmers University, Gothenburg in Sweden and Prof. Dr. Thijs de Grauw of Leiden University and SRON, The Netherlands. |
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| Upcoming events |
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IRAM Summer School 2005: mm Observing Techniques and Applications
Galactic and Extragalactic ISM Modeling in an ALMA Perspective
Physique stellaire avec ALMA
Complex Molecules in Space: present status and prospects with ALMA Planning has been started for a 'Global ALMA Meeting' to be held in Madrid in mid-November 2006. This will be the first world-wide ALMA science meeting since the Washington DC meeting in 1999. The local organization of the meeting will be headed by R. Bachiller (OAN), while the scientific organization will be led by the Alma Science Advisory Committee. |
More information on ALMA and contact details can be found on the ALMA homepage: www.alma.info
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