On behalf of the ALMA Director, with support from all Executives, the recent decisions taken regarding the status of Cycle 7 and Cycle 8 are as follows:

• The start of ALMA Cycle 8 has been postponed until 2021 October. It is anticipated that the Cycle 8 Call for Proposals will open again in 2021 March.
• ALMA Cycle 7 will continue through 2021 September, with currently non-completed projects ranked A, B and C remaining in the observing queue.

The COVID-19 crisis has continued to affect the global community, including ALMA users and staff. ALMA operations remain suspended, as announced on March 20. Under these difficult and unprecedented circumstances, the ALMA Director, with support from all Executives, has decided to suspend the submission of Cycle 8 proposals until further notice. The Cycle 8 proposal submission server will be closed as of 15:00UT on Friday, 17 April, 2020.

ESO is looking for a software engineer to join the Data Flow Infrastructure (DFI) group in the Science Operations Software (SCS) department of the Directorate of Engineering. The DFI group is responsible for the development and maintenance of software tools which are critical for the end-to-end operations of the ESO observatories.

The deadline for applications is the 17th of May. More information and instructions on how to apply are provided on the recruitment portal.

The EU ARC has implemented a service which permits ALMA users to request the calibrated data for a given dataset (Member Obs Unit Set, MOUS) to be made available for download. The service is open both for ALMA PIs or Delegees with proprietary ALMA data and for archival users wanting to use datasets for which the proprietary time has expired.

ALMA is releasing data acquired as part of the Extension and Optimisation of Capabilities effort (EOC). These data were taken as part of the High-Frequency Long-Baseline Campaign (HF-LBC-2017) during Cycle 5, which was organised to test the calibration and imaging capability of ALMA at high-frequencies (>284GHz, Band 7) and using long baselines (>8.5km).

Due to the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on the global astronomical community, the ALMA Director has made the following decision regarding proprietary times of ALMA data sets.

The proprietary period of all MOUSs that have been delivered to principle investigators (PIs), but have not become public on 19 March 2020, will be extended by three months. This implies that the proprietary period of all these ALMA data will effectively be set to 15 months, or nine months for DDT projects. 19 March was the last day that ALMA was observing before Cycle 7 observations were suspended.

Please note that the Cycle 8 Call for Proposals has been suspended due to COVID-19

As everyone is aware, the novel coronavirus COVID-19 continues to adversely impact the global community.  As such, the ALMA Director, along with the regional partners, have decided to delay the proposal deadline for the ALMA Cycle 8 Call for Proposals to NO EARLIER than 15 UT on 19 May, 2020.

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak that has spread to Chile, the ALMA Director has made the decision to suspend science operations with ALMA, effective immediately. This decision has been taken to protect the safety of ALMA staff, many of whom travel long distances by bus and by plane to reach the remote ALMA site in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.