Progress Report on the Japanese ALMA Project

摘要

We report here on the progress of the Japanese ALMA project(ALMA-J). The Japanese ALMA project culminates 20 years of development.There are two main Japanese contributions to the ALMA project, commonlycalled "enhancements". One is the design and construction of the AtacamaCompact Array (ACA). ACA is composed of a total power array with four 12 inantennas and a 7 m array with twelve 7 m antennas. The main role of ACAis to guarantee high fidelity imaging by combining total power data and shortbaseline data with data that are taken with the larger 64 antenna array. Theother enhancement is the production of 80 receiver cartridges for each of threebands, bands 4, 8, and 10, to be installed into both the 64 antenna array and the16 ACA antennas. The construction budget for these enhancements has beenfunded since April 2004.