Host: The Japanese Society for Planetary Sciences: Local Organizing Committee for 2006 Fall Meeting
The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) is an international astronomy project that consists of a system of radio telescopes in an array formation, located at the Atacama desert in northern Chile.The telescopes are capable of detecting sub-millimeter and millimeter wavelengths. The design specification of ALMA demand a much higher calibration accuracy than achieved by the conventional techniques used at the existing millimeter arrays, which is typically no better than 10 %. Absolute flux calibration for ALMA requires standard astronomical objects whose fluxes are known to 5 % accuracy. In order to achieve 5% accuracy calibra-tions, we propose to adopt Uranus and Ceres as primary calibrators.Any comments and collaboration requests by not only astronomers and but planetary scientists are welcome.
