09 Jul 2020:

Dear colleagues,

At this time, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect the lives of ALMA staff and users around the world. Although in some of the ALMA regions the situation is slowly improving, in other regions, including Chile, the evolution of the outbreak remains highly uncertain.

Because of the on-going situation in Chile, ALMA operations unfortunately remain suspended. ALMA staff continue to monitor the situation very carefully and work on the development of detailed plans for the return to operations, which will be initiated when the situation allows. We will keep updating the user community on the developments. 

Northern Chile was recently hit by a magnitude 6.8 earthquake. Fortunately this caused no injuries to ALMA staff and no serious damage at the ALMA site. This was followed by extremely high winds, that led to some minor damage at the OSF.

As always, the ALMA Regional Centres provide support to their respective communities, and can assist in the analysis of your data and help with archive research projects. If you have any questions on this, or comments or concerns related to the situation at ALMA, please contact the ALMA Helpdesk at https://help.almascience.org. 

We wish you, your families and colleagues continued good health and safety.

07 Jul 2020:

During the COVID-19 pandemic all ALMA staff within the European ARC Network have been working from home. As the situation in Europe is now slowly improving, staff at some of the different nodes and centre of expertise are slowly starting to work from the office again.

While visitors are not yet allowed to enter the premises of the respective nodes, the nodes continue to offer face-to-face user support through virtual means. Users that require assistance with data calibration and imaging or archival research projects may contact the ALMA Helpdesk at https://help.almascience.org to schedule a virtual meeting with their node.

The European ARC Network wishes you, your family, friends and colleagues the very best of health and stay safe!

29 Jun 2020:

The first ARI-L continuum images and data cubes generated by the Additional Representative Images for Legacy (ARI-L) ALMA development project are now available for download in the ALMA Science Archive (ASA).

The project aims to increase the legacy value of the ASA by bringing the reduction level of ALMA data from Cycles 2-4 close to the level of the more recent Cycles processed with the ALMA Imaging Pipeline. In three years, the ARI-L project will produce and ingest into the ASA a uniform set of full data cubes and continuum images covering at least 70% of the data from Cycles 2-4. These cubes will complement the much smaller QA2-generated image products, which cover only a small fraction (< 10%) of the observed data for those cycles. The complete set of ARI-L imaging products will be highly relevant for many science-cases and enhance the possibilities of exploitation of archival data.