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The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array(ALMA) Band 1 receiver covers the 35-50 GHz frequency band. Development of prototype receivers, including the key components and subsystems has been completed and two sets of prototype receivers were fully tested. We will provide an overview of the ALMA Band 1 science goals, and its requirements and design for use on the ALMA. The receiver development status will also be discussed and the infrastructure, integration, evaluation of fully-assembled band 1 receiver system will be covered. Finally, a discussion of the technical and management challenges encountered will be presented.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) consists of 66 antennas with the aperture equivalent to a 91-m diameter antenna. The Green Bank Telescope (GBT) is the world’s largest, 100-m diameter telescope in the wavelength range of 3 mm to 30 cm. The Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) will be the world´s largest, 50-m diameter, steerable millimeter-wavelength telescope. The Cerro Chajnantor Atacama Telescope (CCAT) will be the world’s largest, 25-m diameter, submillimeter-wavelength telescope. We will investigate advantages and disadvantages of both the aperture synthesis telescope and the large single-dish telescope taking the cost effectiveness into consideration, and will propose the design of antenna structure for a future telescope project at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is already producing a growing number of impressive and scientifically compelling results during its first two years of operation as the most powerful mm/submm interferometer in the world. However, ALMA still has some scientific weak points due to the technological limitations. In order to maintain ALMA as the state-of-the-art facility over the course of its projected life of 30+ years, continuing technical upgrades and developments for new capabilities are essential. We have already performed future development studies and projects for ALMA enhancement, which are the main development focus for the next 5 - 10 years. We should now start the discussion of the technical requirements and the potential science achievable with larger scale developments which are envisioned in the next 10 - 20 years, because it is emphasized that the larger scale project will likely result in higher impact, groundbreaking ALMA science in the year 2034 and beyond.

Pointing performance of a radio telescope antenna is important in radio astronomical observations to obtain accurate intensity of a target source. The pointing errors of the ALMA ACA antenna are required to be better than 0.6 arcsec rss, which corresponds to 1/10 and 1/20 of the field of view of the ALMA ACA 12-m and 7-m antenna at 950 GHz, respectively. The pointing verification measurements of the ACA antenna were performed using an Optical pointing telescope (OPT) mounted on the antenna backup structure at the ALMA Operations Site Facility at 2900m above the sea level. Pointing errors of these OPT measurements contain three different origins; originated from antenna, originated of atmosphere (optical seeing), and originated of OPT itself. In order to estimate pointing errors of the antenna origin, we need to subtract the components of optical seeing and OPT itself accurately, while we need to add components that cannot be measured in the OPT measurements. The ACA antenna verification test report demonstrated that all the ACA 7-m antenna meets pointing specification of ALMA. However, about one-third of datasets, values of estimated optical seeing is larger than measured pointing errors. We re-examined a procedure to estimate optical seeing, by investigating the property of optical seeing from the high-sampling OPT pointing measurements of long tracking a bright star for 15 minutes. Particularly, we examined the relation between optical seeing and sampling rate derived from Kolmogorov PSD. Our analysis indicated that the optical seeing at ALMA site may have been overestimated in the verification test. We present a new relation between optical seeing and sampling rate proportional to average wind velocity during measurement. We used this new relation to derive the optical seeing and as a result the number of datasets becomes half in which the optical seeing is larger than measured pointing errors. As a result, we successfully develop a new verification method of optical seeing that has high reliability.

In signal transmission through optical fiber, cable length delay fluctuation accompanied by chromatic and polarization-mode dispersion affects the coherence of distributed signals. To maintain signal coherence, it is very important to generate very-high-frequency signals with minimum phase noise and transmission loss. In a photonic local signal generation/distribution system with a microwave-photonic signal generator and a real-time microwave-photonic signal phase stabilizer that we developed as an alternative photonic LO system for ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array), signals are transmitted in the form of frequency difference between two coherent light waves, effectively maintaining the coherence of distributed reference signals. Through the development of the real-time phase stabilizer, we discovered that the system would be further improved with the introduction of a post-processing scheme phase stabilizer and confirmed its effectiveness by experiments.

ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) is a revolutionary radio telescope and its early scientific operation has just started. It is expected that ALMA will resolve several cosmic questions and will give us a new cosmic view. Our passion for astronomy naturally goes beyond ALMA because we believe that the 21st-century astronomy should pursue the new scientific frontier. In this conference, we propose a project of the future radio telescope to search for habitable planets and finally detect 2nd Earth as a migratable planet. Detection of 2nd Earth is one of the ultimate dreams not only for astronomers but also for every human being. To directly detect 2nd Earth, we have to carefully design the sensitivity and angular resolution of the telescope by conducting trade-off analysis between the confusion limit and the minimum detectable temperature. The result of the sensitivity analysis is derived assuming an array that has sixty-four (64) 50-m antennas with 25-;μm surface accuracy mainly located within the area of 300 km (up to 3000 km), dual-polarization SSB receivers with the best noise temperature performance achieved by ALMA or better, and IF bandwidth of 128 or 256 GHz.. We temporarily name this telescope "Very Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (VLMSA)". Since this sensitivity is extremely high, we can have a lot of chances to study the galaxy, star formation, cosmology and of course the new scientific frontier.

We have carried out the experiment of real-time space VLBI by using a high-speed ATM network. A space VLBI program is carried out with the HALCA satellite, which has an 8-m diameter radio telescope. Downlink data is transmitted to Usuda station, which is a Japanese data link station. And Usuda 64-m telescope is used as a ground radio telescope. They were used for this experiment. It is the first experiment that an optical fiber network was applied for a real-time space VLBI. The ATM optical-fiber network has 2.4 Gbps transmission capability. For the real-time space VLBI experiment, 128 Mbps data are transmitted. The VLBI correlator at NAOJ is used, which is usually used for the tape based ground and space VLBI observations. And we have succeeded to detect fringes using this network with a satellite downlink station and a ground radio telescope by test data, which are play-backed with recorded tapes. Unfortunately we have not tested actual observations because of a serious trouble of the satellite.

The gigabit digital filter prototype has been developed with the FPGA (FIeld Programmable Gate Array) for the radio astronomical observation. The digital filtering techniques enables a variety of observing modes defined on the data acquisition system, even with a fixed sampling frequency A/D converter. In this study, the principle of gigabit digital filter design is described in detail, parallel processing design of a FIR (Finite Inpulse Response) filter is presented, and the results of the test manufacturing are shown.© (2000) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.