Álvaro González: our new Development leader

Jan 4, 2024 | News | 2 comments

Tags: ALMA

☆☆☆☆☆

Almansa is very similar to Santiago. It is also just over an hour from the sea and is located at an altitude of 800 meters above sea level. It has a Mediterranean climate that favors the cultivation of vineyards. Just like in Chile, but it is in Spain, in the province of Albacete. This is the birthplace of Álvaro González, the man whose mission since January 2 has been to implement the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU) project, which will bring the Universe even closer to ALMA.

This doctor in physics and engineering is our new Deputy Director of Development. From SCO he explains his task with an analogy: “it will be like refurbishing a car while it is moving”.

Álvaro plays a leading role in keeping ALMA at the forefront of world astronomy. His tasks include coordinating activities with all our teams around the world and guiding the next steps of the ALMA 2030 Development Roadmap.

The WSU, he says, “is the future of ALMA and of world astronomy. We will continue to be a state-of-the-art observatory. ALMA was built with the technology of the beginning of the new millennium, it is almost 20 years old: 10 years in construction, 10 years in operations. If we don’t do something, we may become obsolete. That’s why we have to make this type of upgrades almost obligatory”. He stresses that a key challenge will be “to implement a new telescope in parallel to one that is already working”.
Rapanui and profound changes

Álvaro González has been working at ALMA for 14 years, but always from Japan. “I started as a development engineer for the Band 10 receiver”, he recalls, and now he is enthusiastic about “speaking Spanish again after so many years”, when he arrives in a country where he already knows Rapanui, Patagonia and the desert.

He describes the WSU project as complex and technically thick: “the different parts of the upgrade will be delivered by Europe, North America and East Asia and everything will be assembled in Chile. Apart from that, the challenge is that it is very diverse in the type of expertise needed. It has a lot of engineering, but then there are also going to be very profound changes in the software to operate the telescope and also in the kind of Science Operations model”.

Being a new telescope he believes that the size of the data and even the model will change along the way. The idea is a change in instantaneous bandwidth: the goal is to make it four times wider than it is today. “And apart from that is what’s called the spectral resolution, the finesse with which we can analyze that bandwidth that we’re looking at. Right now, for example, if we want to look at it very finely, we have to narrow it down. In the future, with WSU, we’re going to be able to see everything and with the maximum bandwidth.”
In his new position at ALMA, this professional, fascinated by the altitude of the Andes Mountains, is already thinking in parallel about ALMA 2040: “for example, to have receivers that are not just one pixel in the sky, but many pixels, like a camera. Or increase the maximum distance between antennas. Right now with configuration 10 there are 16 km. So the idea would be to increase to 30 km. to get the angular resolution in the sky to improve and see more detail in the observations. Or increase the number of antennas to detect even weaker signals”.

For the moment the WSU is already in orbit to start with scientific observations towards the end of the decade.

Welcome to JAO Álvaro González!
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS NEWSLETTER, GIVE IT A “LIKE” AND COMMENT!

2 Comments

  2. Martin Diaz
    Martin Diaz on January 5, 2024 at 4:20 pm

    Bienvenido Álvaro!! Vamos por ese tremendo desafío, qué emocionante!!

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post