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R. L. Brown (NAIC)
The ALFA Legacy Surveys are organized as a partnership between NAIC and the community of interested and involved academic researchers. NAIC has committed a large fraction of the time on the Arecibo telescope to the ALFA surveys for the next 5 or more years in return for which the ALFA Consortia are making a large commitment of personnel resources in conducting the surveys, writing the needed software, and archiving the data for use by others. The surveys are facilitated by means of commensal observations—-simultaneous observations made by two or more Consortia each processing the same received signal using different spectrometers designed for different scientific applications. The spectrometer specifications are set by the Consortia, and the hardware is built by NAIC under contract to university-based instrumentation groups.
The NAIC vision of its partnership with the ALFA consortia: (1) Is necessary to the success of the ALFA legacy surveys; (2) Provides the opportunity to re-establish an effective partnership between the national observatory and the academic research community; (3) Reflects the maturity of 50 years of research in radio astronomy.
NAIC is operated by Cornell University under cooperative agreement with the NSF.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 37 #4
© 2005. The American Astronomical Soceity.