The ALMA Pipeline

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) is a radio interferometer that is being built on the Chajnantor plateau at 5000 m altitude in the Atacama desert in Chile. It will consist of 66 telescopes organized in three arrays providing baselines up to 16 km with a zoom configuration including zero spacings. ALMA will provide unprecedented spatial resolution and sensitivity in the mm/submm wavelength range to study star and galaxy formation. The ALMA project intends to reach a broad astronomical community. An automatic reduction pipeline is required to deliver science quality data products also for non-experts. The ALMA Pipeline is being developed as a set of additional tasks based on the CASA (Common Astronomy Software Applications) data reduction package. End-to-end processing for interferometry and single dish data has been implemented. The pipeline features are being commissioned incrementally using ALMA Cycle 0 and Cycle 1 data.