The rather extensive set of science requirements make ALMA a very flexible instrument, providing alarge number of observing modes and strategies to the astronomicalcommunity. In order to ensure that all users can explore thecapabilities of this instrument, great care has been taken to have anOT in which specifying a proposal or an observing project isrelatively simple, and which can be used effectively even bynon-specialists to perform interferometry techniques. Nevertheless,because of the large amount of observing possibilities, specifying anobserving program can be complicated, in particular when using theexpert mode and/or exploring a non-standard observing mode forplanning observations.
In order to ensure that the user's specifications for an observationare possible with ALMA, the OT provides a number of validationchecks. Part of the validation is performed automatically whenobserving parameters are entered: invalid inputs in the fields will becoloured red as a result of on-the-fly validation. In addition,validation for checking overall consistency and completeness should beperformed manually once all the required information has been entered.
Proposals and observing programs will only be accepted by ALMA whenthe validation does not report errors. Therefore, it is essential tocheck the validity of the input constantly and to run the validatorprior to submission. Note that even if a manual validation is not runby the user, it is always run automatically as part of the submissionprocess. Therefore, an invalid proposal can never be submitted to theALMA Archive.
A comprehensive description of proposal and project validation can befound in Chapter 11.2 .