PACE has been invited by the ‘Regiao Autonoma de Azores’ and the RAEGE consortium to visit the Colombo station in the Azores Island of Santa Maria. Equipped with 3 receivers in bands S (2.2 – 2.37 GHz), X (8.15 -9GHz), and Ka (21.77 – 24.45 GHz), this 13.2 m radio telescope is part of the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS) network (RAEGSMAR). During this visit, resident RAEGE scientists described to PACE researchers the capability and the performance of the telescope, in order to explore the possibility of future synergies with such a valuable instrument.

A Picture taken by the PACE representative, José Afonso, during the visit.

PACE members participated in the international Athena-WFI meeting (see link for the detailed programme), held on the end of November at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. The Wide Field Imager (WFI) is an instrument that will be mounted on the Athena Space Observatory, an X-ray telescope designed to address fundamental questions in Astrophysics involving high energies. The launch is scheduled for 2031, and PACE explored during the meeting potential synergies between Athena and millimetre and submillimetre Astronomy.

On 2-4th of July, PACE participated to the ‘ Encontro Ciencia 2018‘, the annual meeting of Portuguese researchers. PACE had its own stand introducing ALMA to the visitors. The photos show the stand and the analyst Israel Matute confronted to curious researchers and students.

The PACE, in collaboration with the ESO, organized an “ALMA Data
Processing Workshop” held in Lisbon on 5th, 6th, and 7th of December and funded by RadioNet consortium (website:
http://www.iastro.pt/research/conferences/alma2017/). The goal of the workshop was to bring together all the community which were planning to use ALMA data in the future, and join them together for different hands-on sessions. The organizers, together with expert invited speakers from the ARC nodes of UK and Netherlands, guided the participants from raw to reduced
data, in two days and half of full work.

Group Photo

A total of 19 astronomers attended the workshop, coming from ten different countries: Pakistan, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, UK, Spain, and of course Portugal. As expected, the most represented communities were Portugal and Spain, for logistics reasons. 37% of the participants were female, and more than half of the participants were PhD or Master students. Beyond the participants, the organizers invited two expert speakers from the ARC node of the UK, Dr. George Bendo, and from Netherlands, Dr. Ciriaco Goddi, which work as ALMA data analysts in their respective ALMA nodes.

An important aspect to underline is that almost 63% of the participants were not experts in interferometry, and approached the topic for the first time. This is very positive, as the main goals of the workshop was exactly to attract young scientists towards the use of interferometric data.

We hope that in the future PACE will continue this  path, organizing other events, with the idea to help the European radio community.

[RadioNet has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No 730562]