Due to the global coronavirus pandemic, almost the whole ALMA site has been shut down for the past six months. With the improving pandemic situation in Chile, ALMA is now scheduled to begin the long process of recovering the telescope array on October 1st, 2020. The road to recovery of operations, and ultimately science observations – a milestone that will not take place this year – has been carefully planned and more details can be found here.

The current restart plan requires about 80 days to reach the antenna power-up milestone, assuming there are no major repairs needed, or changes in the schedule due to impacts of the pandemic. The time needed to recover sufficient antennas for science observations is highly uncertain. Nevertheless, the aim is to have antennas collecting data and verifying the observing systems after approximately 100 days – whether this is a handful, or many antennas, remains difficult to predict. This implies that January is the earliest there may be enough functional antennas and cooled receivers to attempt the first science observations.

Status updates will continue to be provided at least monthly on the Science Portal, as the recovery of operations progresses. Specific capabilities and potential science observing dates will be identified after the status of antennas and other critical systems is better understood.

As always, the ALMA Regional Centres continue to provide support to their respective communities. At Allegro, we continue to actively provide support to our users. Don’t hesitate to e-mail us in case of questions, comments, or concerns.

The ALMA Director, with support from all Executives and the ALMA Board, has taken the following recent decisions regarding the status of Cycle 7 and Cycle 8:

• The start of ALMA Cycle 8 has been postponed until 2021 October. It is anticipated that the Cycle 8 Call for Proposals will open again in 2021 March.
• ALMA Cycle 7 will continue through 2021 September, with currently non-completed projects ranked A, B and C remaining in the observing queue.

There remain many questions outstanding regarding resuming observations and accepting future proposals during these uncertain times.  ALMA is working on these questions and will provide a next update to the community in the coming weeks.

Allegro continues to actively provide support to our users. Don’t hesitate to e-mail us in case of questions or concerns.

Due to the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on the global astronomical community, the ALMA Director has made the following decision regarding proprietary times of ALMA data sets.

The proprietary period of all MOUSs that have been delivered to principle investigators (PIs), but have not become public by 19 March 2020, will be extended by three months. This implies that the proprietary period of all these ALMA data will effectively be set to 15 months, or nine months for DDT projects. 19 March was the last day that ALMA was observing before Cycle 7 observations were suspended.

For data sets that already reached the end of the proprietary time between March 19 and today, the proprietary time will be reinstated and extended for an additional 3 months. Please be aware that ALMA cannot guarantee that these data sets have not already been downloaded by archive users.

PIs of data sets that do not fall in the category defined above, who feel that their ability to work on their data within the regular proprietary period is impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, are requested to submit a ticket to the “Proprietary Period Extension Requests” Department of the ALMA Helpdesk. ALMA will handle these requests in a fair and lenient manner as we are committed to support our users as much as possible during this stressful time.

Updates on this policy may be posted on the Science Portal in the future.

Don’t hesitate to e-mail Allegro in case of questions or concerns.

For Cycle 8, ALMA is adopting dual-anonymous review. This means that the proposers do not know who the reviewers are, and the reviewers don’t know who is on the proposing team. This has important consequences on how you write your proposal!

ALMA has put together a document with guidelines. Consequently, any text that can identify the proposing team is not allowed. Attempts to convey the identify proposing team in the text may lead to your proposal being disqualified.

What you need to do:

• Read the guidelines.
• Write your new proposal according to these guidelines, and rephrase the text of proposals that are re-submissions from previous cycles.

A presentation describing how to write an anonymous ALMA proposal can be found below (pdf file).

Allegro is organizing a proposal preparation workshop on Thursday March 26, where these requirements will be discussed together with other technical information about ALMA Cycle 8. You can register for the Proposal Preparation Day at the following link.