Facilities Introduction

The ALMA Regional Center (ARC) provides an interface between the ALMA Observatory and the user community in each region from the stage of proposal preparation to actual data distribution and analysis. All the ALMA users are required to access ALMA through the ARC at their relevant region. There are three main ARCs in the world; North American ARC (NA-ARC), European ARC (EU-ARC), and East Asian ARC (EA-ARC). In ASIAA, we have established the Taiwanese ARC node on November 4, 2009, as a branch of the NA and EA-ARCs. The role of ARCs is classified into two categories,“core functions” and “enhanced functions”, and the Taiwanese ARC node will collaborate with EA-ARC for the core functions and with NA-ARC for the enhanced functions. Our Taiwanese ARC node serves all the ALMA user community in Taiwan, and offers supports for the ALMA proposal and observational preparation, data reduction and data analysis. These include:

Core Functions

  • Promote ALMA Science in Taiwan and inform the Taiwanese community of the status and progress of ALMA.
  • Setting up Taiwanese ALMA web pages and computing resources.
  • Contribute to the preparation and distribution of the Call for proposals and user documentation.
  • Organize training material, tutorials, workshops, user's meetings, and visit institutions.
  • Arrange staff and respond to ALMA Helpdesk queries.
  • Allocate contact scientists to facilitate interaction of PIs with ALMA.
  • Assist Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) in the Proposal Review Process.
  • Originate, verify, correct and describe to PIs, observing scheduling blocks.
  • Allocate Astronomers-on-Duty (AoD) for observations monitoring.
  • Undertake data reduction, data quality assurance (QA) and enable distribution of data to PIs.

Enhanced Functions

  • Advanced software development & maintenance (modified pipelines, novel algorithms for calibration/imaging,...)
ARC introduction