ALMA Cycle 0 (Early Science) Call for Proposals

The Call for Proposals for ALMA Early Science Cycle 0 has been issued on March 30th, 2011.

• Announcement of the ALMA Cycle 0 Call for Proposals

A PI in Taiwan has access to ALMA through both East Asia (EA) and North America (NA) regions. He/She can select which region the time should be charged to. He/She can register in the ALMA Science Portal in both regions with different User Names and E-mail addresses.

Potential users are strongly encouraged to register in the ALMA User Portal, and use the ALMA Helpdesk to ask any questions about proposals preparation.

• ALMA Science Portal on EA NAOJ side
• ALMA Science Portal on NA NRAO side

More information on the proposal preparation can be found here.

ALMA Taiwan Mock Review

With the ALMA proposal deadline (06/30/11) fast approaching, prospective users should get their proposals prepared now. As noted at the recent ALMA user workshop on 05/21, the ARC Taiwan node will hold a mock ALMA proposal review.

Recent SMA proposal statistics have shown alarming messages about the quality of proposals from on-island investigators, and as noted in the user workshop, the competition of ALMA early science cycle 0 will be extremely high (with a oversubscription rate possibly exceeding 10!). Thus, only very well-prepared proposals will succeed.

Proposals fail sometimes due to 1) unclear science questions or goals and/or poorly designed experimenting methods/approaches, but also often due to 2) poor writing or last minute compilation. The purpose of this review is to improve the quality of ALMA-T proposals for better success rate by enforcing potential users to prepare the proposals early, thus, to at least eliminate the last minute writing and to further sharpen the science ideas.

This mock review is open to all Taiwanese users including the ones outside of ASIAA. The proposal submission deadline is 2011.06.10. Full proposal, including scientific and technical justification, figures and tables, is required to submit to arcasiaa.sinica.edu.tw in pdf format. Technical assessment will be carried out by the Taiwan ARC staff. Scientific review will be conducted through paper by a review panel, including Naomi Hirano, Shih-Ping Lai, Wei-Hao Wang, Kazushi Sakamoto, and Ciska Kemper.

Technical and scientific review comments will feedback to the PIs through email a week afterwards on 2011.06.17. Face-to-face discussion with the ARC staff or review panel members may be considered and arranged. PIs can incorporate these comments into proposal revision before "true" submission.