Poster
C. Pappalardo
Abstract
Since 2014, the Institute of Astronomy and Space Sciences of Lisbon has seen its capabilities for ALMA research internationally recognized, being named by ESO as an ALMA Centre of Expertise. This is a result of an objective effort over the last few years to increase the national capability in the exploration of this revolutionary observatory. The Portuguese ALMA Centre of Expertise (PACE) provided along these years face-to-face support to the Portuguese community regarding all stages of ALMA observations: pre-Cycle ALMA promotion, proposal preparation and submission, data reduction and archival research. PACE is also already actively supporting the ALMA project by participating in the task of ALMA data validation and quality assurance. Centres of Expertise are aimed at developing key expertise while supporting their local (national) user community in the use of ALMA. While top-level responsibilities are still reserved to the central ARC node (such as the distribution of calls for proposals or managing the time allocation procedures), others are distributed among the Nodes and Centers of Expertise improving the efficiency of user support (e.g., the speed of data delivery to the PI). The latter include: (i) face-to-face interaction with the community to directly support proposal preparation, data reduction, or archival research; (ii) phase II proposal scheduling and execution; (iii) community preparation via meetings and visits to institutes; (iv) outreach. In this talk I will present the PACE core team, I will describe the computational capabilities provided to the community for computationally expensive data reduction tasks, and finally I will show how PACE has grown in the last years an ALMA user community and has become, in a very short timescale, proficient in the use of a new and revolutionary instrument. PACE will continue the promote ALMA and increase its use by the national community, and as a support facility, welcomes visitors at the Astronomical Observatory of Lisbon, where it is located, and where the community will find dedicated personnel and computer hardware.
XXIX Encontro Nacional de Estudantes de Astronomia
Lisboa, Portugal
2019 September
