Proposing your observations
for ALMA Cycle 9
Misato Fukagawa
East Asia ALMA Regional Center
29st March 2022

2022/3/29

1

ALMA

• Interferometer consisting of 66 antennas• Fifty 12-m antennas  12-m Array• Atacama Compact Array (ACA; Morita Array）• Twelve 7-m (7-m Arary), Four 12-m (Total Power, TP)• From 0.32 mm to 3.6 mm (Band 3 to 10) for Cycle 92022/3/29©Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), A. Marinkovic/X-Cam

2

ALMA Regional Center:Interface for users
Joint ALMA Observatory

Effective array operations: Execution of programs under suitable conditions
High availability of the array for science : Repairs, Preventive maintenance

Science operations in regional centers with functions agreed inEA, EU, and NA, in close coordination with JAO

EA ARCEU ARCNA ARCEA ALMA users

EU ALMA users

NA ALMA users

2022/3/29• ARC provide support for users in the respective regions so that users canconcentrate on proposing observations, data analysis, and science discussion.
• Support can be optimized to the regional situation (e.g., native language,specific demands from users).
3Proposing observations in ALMA• “Cycle” in ALMA: One year period, starting from October every year

• Cycle 9: From October 2022 to September 2023
• Calls every year
• Main Call
• 12-m Array, 7-m Array, TP• Call for Proposals in March• Observations from October 2022 to September 2023
• 4300 hours each for 12-m, 7-m, and TP Arrays• Supplemental Call … No Supplemental Call for Cycle 9• DDT• Users can propose anytime in the on-going cycle• DDT projects will stay in the queue for 12 months

2022/3/294

Proposing observations in ALMA
• Science observations will be scheduled and executed taking into account multiple
factors including, for example, weather, proposal grade and executive balance• Priorities• Grade A• Highest grade, carried over to the next Cycle“Users Policies”(Long baseline SBs are not carried over to the next Cycle
without LB)

https://almascienc
e.nao.ac.jp/documents-andtools/cycle9/almauser-policies• Grade B• No carry over
• Grade C• Filler• After observations…
• Quality assurance (meet the PI’s request?) per MOUS  delivered to the PI• Data become public after 12 months (6 months for DDT)
2022/3/29

5

Information is in the Science Portal
https://almascience.nao.ac.jp/

You can login here.

You can finddocuments related toproposalplanning/submission.
Please check“Proposer’s Guide” inparticular.
2022/3/29

You can check any news here.

Please register yourscience expertise inyour Profile (click“Preferences” menu).
The information will
be used in theassignment ofproposals that you will
review (distributed
peer review)6… and ask us via the Helpdesk
https://help.almascience.org• We can accept Japanese questions although you may need to wait until theJapanese staff are available (be careful, in particular just before the deadline)

You will be asked to login when you try to submit aticket. Please register in the Science Portal first if you
do not have an account.
Please use your registered email address for thelogin name in the Helpdesk (please use the same
password as the Science Portal when you login for
the first time)
2022/3/29

7

… and ask us via the Helpdesk
https://help.almascience.org• Any changes, clarifications, orbugs that are discovered afterthe publication of theProposer’s Guide will be
documented in theKnowledgebase article.

https://help.almascience.org/kb/articles/
what-cycle-9-proposal-issues-andclarifications-should-i-be-aware-ofbefore-submitting-my-prop
2022/3/29

8

Register/update your “Expertise” in your profile• Please register/update your “Expertise” in your user profile. This is extremely
important for the proposal assignments in the distributed peer review system.
Please select one to as many keywords as your expertise
requires.
Login or newly register

Updating the profile in“Preferences”

2022/3/29

Click “Next” button to move to the“Expertise” tab.
After updating the keywords, go to thefinal “Confirm” tab, then submit.
9ScheduleDateMilestone

24 March 2022
(15:00 UT)

Release of Cycle 9 CfP, Observing Tool, and supporting documents, andopening of the Archive for proposal submission

August 2022

Announcement of the outcome of the proposal review process

21 April 2022
(15:00 UT)

October 2022

Proposal submission deadline for Cycle 9 proposals

Start of ALMA Cycle 9 science observations

September 2023 End of ALMA Cycle 9Emergency Department in the Helpdesk: from 8:00JST on April 19
Helpdesk tickets will be taken care of by ARC staff globally, urgently, depending on the time of ticket
submission. If you need an urgent reply, please use English.
(You can submit tickets to the usual department if the topic is not related to the proposal submission.
Those will be handled as usual.)

2022/3/29

10What should proposers know, what’s new…
Observing capabilities  Nagai-san’s talkObserving Tool  Jorge’s talk

Scheduling and Phase 2 generation viewpoints  Yu-Ting’s talk2022/3/29

11

Proposal types• Regular, Large Program, Target of Opportunity, VLBI and phased-array (, DDT)
• Regular• Estimated execution time does not exceed 50 hours on the 12-m Array or 150hours on the 7-m Array in stand-alone mode.
• Large Program• Estimated execution time >50 hours on the 12-m Array (with or withoutaccompanying ACA time) or 150 hours on the 7-m Array in stand-alone mode.
• Large Programs should not involve time-critical or ToO observations, and may notinclude full polarization measurements, solar observations, VLBI, Phased Arraymode, Astrometric observations or observations requiring band-to-band
calibration or bandwidth switching calibration.
• Large Programs may fill up to 33% of the available time for a given LST range inthe 12-m Array configurations C-9 and C-10 and up to 50% of the time in theremaining Cycle 9 configurations (i.e., the ACA and C-1 through C-8).
2022/3/29

12

Large Programs• Please do not hesitate to propose large scale
proposals.
• Planning of Large Programs

2022/3/29• A LP proposal should address strategic scientific issues
that will lead to a major advance or breakthrough inthe field, be a coherent science project and not
reproducible by a combination of Regular proposals,
lead to value-added data products (to ALMA within
one year of the final calibrated products), and contain asolid management plan (one page) ensuring anefficient utilization of the data.
• ARCs can provide assistance to the LP teams forobserving strategy, and preparation of themanagement plans. PIs are encouraged to contact theARC early in the proposal process.
• Computing and storage, estimates of available
observing hours in each LST, observing settings etc.

13

Proposal format• Page limits• Total length: 4 pages for Regular, ToO, mm-VLBI and DDT proposals, 6pages for Large Programmes (A4 or US Letter format)• Font size: no smaller than 12 points including figure captions, tables andreferences• FAQ: https://help.almascience.org/kb/articles/why-is-the-ot-is-complaining-that-thetext-in-my-pdf-is-too-small• Latex template is in the Science Portal and users can use it.

2022/3/29

14

No Supplemental Call
• Cycle 9 will NOT include a Supplemental
CfP for stand-alone ACA observations. The
community is encouraged to submit ACA
stand alone projects, especially in the LST
range of 20h to 10h, for the April 2022
deadline.

2022/3/29

Estimated execution time in Cycle 8 2021 forsubmitted (gray) and Grade A/B/C (blue) projects.

15Planning high-frequency projects• Projects with observations in thehighest-frequency Bands 8, 9, and 10 are
strongly encouraged.
• Please be aware about the estimatedavailable time for those bands when youplan observations.

2022/3/29“I hesitated to propose when I saw how little time
ALMA has spent for HF bands.” …but this also comesfrom few proposals.

16

What’s new: Review process(Details will be provided in tomorrow’s session)• Panel review for Large programs, distributed peer review for others• Distributed Peer Review: For each proposal submitted, the PI or a designee fromthe list of investigators will review and rank 10 submitted proposals from this Call.
• All proposals will be reviewed in dual-anonymous• Exception: one-page management plan for Large Programmes• There are other new things in the review process  Andrea’s talk tomorrow• If you cannot attend, the recording is available on request by the proposal deadline. Please ask
us. The contact information is in the meeting webpage:https://www2.nao.ac.jp/~eaarc/PPM2021/2022/3/29

17

Keeping the anonymity in your proposal writing• Goal: To have reviewers focus on the scientific merit of the proposal rather than theproposal team
• It is the responsibility of the proposers to ensure anonymity is preserved in the information
provided in the cover sheet, and when preparing the Scientific Justification and TechnicalJustification.
• You do not have to be too worried about possible rejections as long as you are trying tofollow the guideline. But, please do not ignore the guideline, and please do not clearlyspecify who is the PI in the proposal text, e.g., please do not say “We showed in Smith et al.
(2019) that …”.
FAQ in EA: Resubmission, Projectcode/ID of previous/ongoingobservations
 Examples in the Science Portal

2022/3/29

https://almascience.nao.ac.jp/proposing/alma-proposalreview/dual-anonymous23

Other notes• No Phase 2 deadline for PIs• Please carefully check that your observing setting at Phase 1 (proposalsubmission) is correct.

• Upper cap for a few observing modes• As Nagai-san will present, there will be a time cap in the total hours for a few
modes, but please do not hesitate to propose. Users seemed to have overreacted to this type of cap.
• Source coordinates (stated in the Users Policies)• Please do not intentionally hide the true coordinates.

2022/3/29

18

Archive updates/features

ALMA Science Archive in the Request Handler page

① Search the data as usual③ Click “Request
download”② After choosing the data,
click this for data request.

https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/ari-l

Automatic search for similar
proposals with a mouse over of “…”2022/3/29

19

Archive updates/features

ALMA Science Archive in the Request Handler page
⑤ Click the link icon toCARTA as a viewer

A new webpage automatically
opens in your browser! (Youdo not have to install CARTA
desktop version).

④ Open the file tree
by clicking ▶
https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/ari-l

You can check and analyze the images/cubes
without downloading the data to your local
disk. (e.g., you can generate and immediately
check moment maps in CARTA)
2022/3/29

20

Archive features: ARI-L

Additional Representative Images for Legacy (ARI-L):
A uniform set of full data cubes and continuum images of the data from Cycles 2-4.
In the Request Handler page,
you will see “external” with thepackage name “ari_l”.
ARI-L images are also inthe JVO archive in NAOJ

https://sites.google.com/inaf.it/ari-l

In the search results page, it says “ARI-L”

2022/3/2921

ALMA-J support• Support for the English editing service in April• Deadline of application to us: April 14, 17:00JST (planned)• ALMA-J Users Email List

https://www2.nao.ac.jp/~eaarc/DATARED/alma_users_email_list.html

2022/3/29

22