The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is the largest (sub)mm-wavelength ground-based telescope and has been producing ground-breaking science since it became operational in 2011. The ALMA Development Roadmap was released in 2018 to prioritize the developments necessary to significantly expand ALMA’s capabilities and enhance its scientific reach in the coming decades. The ALMA2030 Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU) is the top priority initiative for the Development Roadmap. The WSU will initially double, and eventually quadruple, ALMA’s system instantaneous bandwidth and deliver improved sensitivity by upgrading the receivers, digital electronics, and correlator. The WSU will afford significant improvements for every future ALMA observation, whether it is focused on continuum or spectral line science. The improved sensitivity and spectral tuning grasp will open exciting new avenues of science capability, increase sample sizes, and enable more efficient observations.
The WSU is now well underway with key subsystems under development, including new receivers, digitizers, data transmission system and correlator. In parallel, the observatory is advancing the detailed planning towards implementation through a careful project management and systems engineering approach, based on an integrated Conceptual System Design which outlines the hardware, computing and science operations aspects of the upgrade. The substantial gains in the observing efficiency enabled by the WSU will further enhance ALMA as the world leading facility for millimeter/submillimeter astronomy.
The ALMA 2030 Development Roadmap defines the long-term scientific objectives and serves as a guide for the development activity for the upgrade of hardware, software, and analysis tools in order to enhance the future observing capabilities of ALMA. A working group was established to define a set of consistent system level technical goals in order to guide the ongoing and future ALMA technical development effort. The working group has prepared an updated set of technical goals for Front-end and Digitizer products to enable the scientific needs as stipulated in the ALMA 2030 Development Roadmap. This manuscript describes the working group’s considerations of system trade-offs and feasibility studies and presents tentative specifications arrived at for some of the key technical requirement goals.
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