The ESO internal ALMA development study "Bayesian Adaptive Interferometric Image Reconstruction Methods" officially started with a kickoff meeting in December 2020. This study investigates the feasibility of artificial intelligence methodologies to refine the CASA package in view of the ALMA 2030 roadmap.

A new development study, led by the Group for Advanced Receiver Development (GARD) at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, will develop new processes to fabricate small size Superconductor Insulator Superconductor (SIS) junctions, which are at the heart of the ALMA receivers. 

A new development study, led by the Group for Advanced Receiver Development (GARD) at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, will complement the SIS process study to investigate the impact of a significant increase in the IF bandwidth on all the receiver components. 

The recent software releases brought several new features and improvements in the ALMA Science Archive (ASA) which are now ready to be discovered.

The European ARC Network is offering an online training on the ALMA Science Pipeline on December 4, 2020, 11:00 CET [Zoom link]. In this training session participants will learn how to run the ALMA Science Pipeline for their own scientific purposes. They will be guided on how to tweak different parameters of the pipeline tasks to produce cleaned data cubes from publicly available ALMA data. This will allow users to obtain products that are tailored to the specific requirements of their science projects.

The European ARC Network is offering a topical training on some recently added functionality of the ALMA Science Archive like access to individual files, the CARTA remote visualization and the new ALMA VO services. The training session will be on December 15, 2020, 11:00 CET [Google link]. An overview over the European ALMA development project ARI-L will follow. ARI-L has already delivered over 74000 science FITS files to the ALMA Science Archive completing the existing ALMA products for Cycles 2-4.

The European ARC Network is offering an online training on UVMultiFit on January 15, 2021, 11:00 CET [Zoom link]. The tool UVMultiFit is a versatile library for fitting models directly to visibility data. Visibility fitting can be a powerful method to analyze interferometric data and extract source information without the need to process image deconvolution. During this training session users will learn how to use this tool on real, publicly available ALMA data.

Dear colleagues,

With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to impact our lives around the world, everyone at ALMA hopes that you and your families are staying safe and healthy. The pandemic situation in Chile is remaining stable and over the past few weeks ALMA staff have been moving forward with ALMA’s plan to recover the telescope array in the Atacama, as announced on October 1st, 2020.