On October 29, 2022, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) suffered a cyber-attack on its computer systems, forcing the suspension of astronomical observations and the public website. This event is under investigation by local authorities.The Computing team quickly isolated the Antennas and Correlator systems and the Science Archive data systems. However, communication and other operational clusters were affected, forcing ALMA to stop all observations. Since then, email communication has been restored safely, along with new collaboration tools that enable the staff to continue their regular work.

The Crisis Management Team has developed a full-recovery plan in consultation with cyber security officers from ESO/NAOJ/NRAO. Our highest priority is to work hard to resume observations before the end of the year.

For its ALMA Regional Centre at the Headquarters in Garching near Munich, Germany, ESO is opening the position of:

ALMA Regional Centre Astronomer

The closing date for receipt of applications to be considered for the position is 10 January, 2023. For more information, please see the full vacancy announcement on the ESO Recruitment Portal website.

CASA is the designated science data analysis package for ALMA. An updated reference paper on this software, which is produced jointly by NRAO, ESO, NAOJ, and JIV-ERIC under the guidance of NRAO, was published this month together with a sister paper on the new VLBI processing capabilities of CASA.

Allegro announces the 6th Netherlands ALMA Science Day, that will take place in person at Leiden Observatory on Thursday, 8 December 2022. At the Science Day, we will highlight the latest scientific results obtained with ALMA by the Netherlands astronomical community. The meeting will also allow ample time to discuss user experiences and other ALMA related topics. Registration for contributed talks is now open (registration form, deadline: 25 November 2022) and we welcome contributions in all science areas.  

ESO is pleased to announce the Call for Proposals for development studies for ALMA upgrades, with a deadline for proposal submission on 24 January 2023 at 20:00 CET. Interested parties are encouraged to visit this page to request the proposal submission package. Studies can cover a wide range of topics. Proposals following the scientific priorities outlined in the ALMA 2030 roadmap are particularly encouraged, such as upgrades of the Intermediate Frequency (IF) bandwidth by a factor up to 4 compared to the current system. Proposals for new advanced data products are also solicited in this call.

The European ARC Network invites users to an online training on tclean on  November 25^th, 11:00 CET [Zoom link].

Cycle 8 2021 was closed on 30 September 2022, and Cycle 9 observations successfully started later that same day. Cycle 8 12-m array data acquisition was the second highest in ALMA history, exceeding the total time of science observing of the pre-pandemic Cycle 6, despite having significantly more weather downtime than at that Cycle. For more information on the ALMA status and the Cycle 9 configuration schedule please visit the ALMA Science Portal.

The ALMA Science Archive (ASA) has reached a major milestone which we call version 1.0. The most recent addition is a Virtual Observatory Server-side Operations for Data Access (SODA) service at each ARC. This service allows astronomers to generate image or cube cutouts of smaller spatial or spectral regions of the data they are interested in on-the-fly. A detailed description of the current state of the ASA and this achievement can be found in the corresponding ESO Messenger article.