The North American ALMA Science Center (NAASC)
Welcome to the North American ALMA Science Center (NAASC). We are located at the NRAO headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia. The NAASC services include:
- Organizing ALMA meetings/workshops
- Visiting institutions to give presentations on ALMA
- Supporting Commissioning & Science Verification efforts
- Supporting community preparation of ALMA proposals (providing current information on ALMA observing modes and capabilities; supporting community use of ALMA Observing Tool; staffing helpdesk; validating scheduling blocks)
- Providing post-observation user support (answering helpdesk tickets; supporting user visits to NAASC for data reduction)
- Maintaining ALMA websites, proposal guides, data reduction "cookbooks"
Our team is active and growing. Meet us. Join us.
The North American ALMA Regional Center (NA ARC) is a subset of the NAASC, concentrating on the internationally agreed ALMA core functions. The ALMA international partners in East Asia and Europe support similar ALMA Regional Centers. In North America, the ARC is a partnership between NRAO , the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), supported by the Millimeter Astronomy Group at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC).
North America's contributions to ALMA include:
- The North American ALMA Science Center, ALMA "headquarters" for North America
- Receiver cartridges for ALMA bands 3 and 6
- An ALMA "Front End Integration Center" where receiver cartridges from around the world are integrated into large cabinets that are then shipped to Chile for installation into antennas
- At least twenty-five 12-meter antennas
- ALMA's photonic local oscillator
- Digital electronics for transmitting signals from the antennas
- The correlator for the 12-meter array
- The Array Operations Site (AOS) technical building, second highest steel frame building in the world
- Road and power distribution to the AOS
- A variety of tools, including the Common Astronomy Software Applications (CASA) tool, Simdata, and Splatalogue.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of East Asia, Europe and North America in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan, in Europe by the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO) and in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC). ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), on behalf of Europe by ESO, and on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI).
The Partner ALMA Websites are provided below:
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