Common-user Facility Research Articles

Performance and calibration of the NIKA camera at the IRAM 30 m telescope

The New IRAM KID Array (NIKA) instrument is a dual-band imaging camera operating with Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KID) cooled at 100 mK. NIKA is designed to observe the sky at wavelengths of 1.25 and 2.14 mm from the IRAM 30 m telescope at Pico Veleta with an estimated resolution of 13\,arcsec and 18 arcsec, respectively. This work presents the performance of the NIKA camera prior to its opening to the astrophysical community as an IRAM common-user facility in early 2014. NIKA is a test bench for the final NIKA2 instrument to be installed at the end of 2015. The last NIKA observation campaigns on November 2012 and June 2013 have been used to evaluate this performance and to improve the control of systematic effects. We discuss here the dynamical tuning of the readout electronics to optimize the KID working point with respect to background changes and the new technique of atmospheric absorption correction. These modifications significantly improve the overall linearity, sensitivity, and absolute calibration performance of NIKA. This is proved on observations of point-like sources for which we obtain a best sensitivity (averaged over all valid detectors) of 40 and 14 mJy.s$^{1/2}$ for optimal weather conditions for the 1.25 and 2.14 mm arrays, respectively. NIKA observations of well known extended sources (DR21 complex and the Horsehead nebula) are presented. This performance makes the NIKA camera a competitive astrophysical instrument.

The Interport

In a container transportation and logistics network, an interport is a common user facility located in the hinterland of one or several seaports where services are available to carriers and shippers such as transshipping, customs clearance and inspection, temporary storage, tagging, and sorting. Interports pose opportunities and challenges for operators involved in freight transport and trade. Mathematically, the authors identify the “interport model” as an extension of the conventional transshipment problem in a hub-and-spokes configuration with the interport treated as a novel kind of hub. The model highlights the advantages that shippers may enjoy in routing their containers from the seaports to their final hinterland destinations via one or several interports. They also discuss an empirical application portraying the intermodal transportation network in the Campania region, Italy. The major seaports of the region are Naples and Salerno; the recently constructed terminal, warehousing and processing facilities at Nola and Marcianise are recognized as interports. A linear programming model minimizes the sum of all container-related logistic costs throughout the entire network, including customs inspection, handling, and storage costs. The solution demonstrates the critical role of adequate customs facilities at the interports, and adequate railway connections between the seaports and the interports.

The Liverpool Telescope

The Liverpool Telescope is a 2.0 metre robotic telescope on La Palma. It achieved first light in July 2003, and began science operations in January 2004, with (supervised) robotic operation from April 2004. Unmanned operation is planned for October 2004. As a national, common-user facility, the telescope must support over 50 science programmes and is equipped both with common user and experiment specific instruments. As an example, the SupIRCam instrument has been designed to obtain infrared light curves of Type Ia supernovae. This instrument achieved first light in July 2004. From August 2004 the telescope participates in the ROBONET-1.0 network of 2.0 metre telescopes with the Faulkes Telescopes located in Hawaii and Australia, executing coordinated observations of GRB and exoplanet microlensing events. (© 2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

Active compensation of flexure on the WHT ISIS spectrograph

ISIS Spectrograph Automatic Active Collimator (ISAAC) was developed at the Optical Science Lab, University College London, as an experimental system to improve the image stability on the detectors of the Intermediate-dispersion Spectroscopic and Imaging System (ISIS) at the William Herschel Telescope (WHT). It is based on the concept of active compensation, where spectrum drifts, owing to the spectrograph flexing under the effect of gravity, are compensated by the movement of an active optical element. ISAAC is a fine-steering tip-tilt collimator mirror; it was tested on the spectrograph in 1995 July. Here we report the details of the design and the laboratory tests together with the results of the experiment on ISIS at the WHT. The experiment shows that active compensation can reduce flexure down to less than 3mum over 4h of telescope motions, dramatically improving the spectrograph A way of implementing ISAAC as a common user facility is briefly discussed, together with a study of the characteristics of flexure in ISIS.

Productivity of first-generation container terminals: Sydney, Australia

In 1969 the first of Sydney's purpose-built container facilities in Port Jackson, the Seatainer terminal, became operational. Later, in 1973, the second terminal at Glebe Island, a common-user facility, shared the task of handling the container traffic for much of eastern Australia until the development of the new facilities in Botany Bay. The two terminals differed in almost every respect except their inner-city locations and restricted sites. This paper explores these differences and their implications for terminal productivity. It examines some of the structural characteristics of the container trade and traffic and defines vessel time profiles and container handling rates for operations over the sample years 1977, 1979 and 1981. The paper establishes that there were remarkably similar productivity characteristics at the two terminals, despite their significant characteristics, but it also reveals the relatively high proportion of vessel alongside time or time spent at the berth that was idle, non-work...