Draft minutes of Dec 13th SSR phone meeting:
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Attended by :

Barry Clark, Mark Holdaway, Steve Scott, Mel Wright, Robert Lucas, Jeff Mangum,
John Richer, Francois Viallefond, Brian Glendenning, Al Wootten, Joe Schwarz



1) Short reports on some areas

 - real-time operations                
 Barry Clark is preparing a specification on the scripting language.
 It's clear that the array must be split if only to allow technical 
 observations in parallel with astronomy.

 - proposal submission and handling    
 a message has been sent by Peter  Schilke (today). 
 . it's clear that word of mouth is not enough for the information on
    fields already observed; the data base available to proposers should
    include source coordinates and frequencies, observing technique, and
    how much observing time was used.
 . the consensus is that the proposal should be submitted in two
   phases: before scientific evaluation (justification + simple cover sheet to
   evaluate feasibility) and after: actual definition of the observing
   parameters and procedure.


 - scheduling 
  a message was sent by by Mel Wright (Dec 10); he is preparing a memo on 
  that subject that should   be available some time soon. 
  His concept of `table' was discussed, but the outcome was not very clear; 
  we should continue this subject by email.

  Other areas were not discussed.

2) Questions to be openly asked to Science group


 - What is the minimum integration time in Total power mode and 
   Interferometry ?
   These condition the data rate that the computing system should allow.
   Al Wootten's group looked into these numbers and concluded that the
   values in MMA Memo #164 (Scott et. al.) are still appropriate, updated for
   the number of baselines.

 - Are images the usual data product ?
   . for single field synthesis
   . for mosaic
   . for total power maps (line or continuum)
   If yes, should this be the case at all cost (for difficult case this might 
   mean having people do the actual imaging -> cost)
   Should we otherwise limit image productions to images that can be produced 
   automatically ?

 - Is dynamic scheduling to be used ?

 - Do we need interactive control of the array for science observations ?

 - We need some feedback on the list of observing modes 

 (see drafted list of observing modes in 
  http://iraux2.iram.fr/~lucas/almassr/operations/operations.html)

3) Next meeting

 - Socorro meeting on Jan 13-14

 - we considered a phone meeting on that occasion.