Australia Telescope Users Committee report
The first meeting of the Australia Telescope Users Committee for 2002 was held on 11 - 12 April 2002. There were nine members in attendance and the meeting was chaired by Dr Anne Green. The committee thanked the following departing members: Drs Balasubrahmanyan, Walker, Corbett and Sood, Ms Getts and Mr Mitchell. Dr Green announced she will step down as Committee Chair.
In the Open session on the first day the meeting received status reports from each facility and the AIPS++ project. An additional report, on the Long Baseline Array (VLBI) facility, was given by Tasso Tzioumis. Lister Staveley-Smith reported on the graduate student program.
There was a brief presentation by Vincent McIntyre on the impending changes to the computing environment, when ATNF joins the CSIRO-wide NEXUS authentication domain. The major visible change will be unix account login names. A less obvious change is the final delivery point for electronic mail, which is being moved to Microsoft Exchange servers. Most unix mail clients are able to access them transparently.
During the business session, ATUC gave its support to the draft Strategic Plan outlined by Ray Norris, particularly the criteria for accepting external research and development contracts.
The committee again discussed the match between engineering advances and scientific outcomes from the SKA demonstrator program and undertook to organise a session at the ASA meeting to discuss "SKA Demonstrator Science".
ATUC congratulated the organisers of the very successful Open Day held at Marsfield in late November. Congratulations were also extended to the radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation group, which is making good progress on reducing RFI at Parkes.
The committee made some recommendations to encourage use of the LBA facility, including some observing support from ATNF at the Ceduna telescope. ATUC also suggested that a full listing of the RPFITS files in the ATCA archive be made available on the web, to streamline the process of requesting archival data.
Vince McIntyre
ATUC Secretary
(Vincent.McIntyre@csiro.au)