assess_ms 3 - the ALMA uv coverage assessment tool

Purpose

assess_ms helps the radio astronomer to determine the quality of ALMA (Atacama Large mm/sub-mm Array) data with respect to its uv coverage, i.e. how sensitive the observation was to the accessible range of angular scales, what the effective parameters like angular resolution and maximum recoverable scale were, and to which extent the uv coverage deviated from the ideal. 

The software is based on the ideas developed in an ALMA development study on uv coverage assessment and scheduling which ran from 2020 to 2024 and published its result in two conference papers (Petry, Diaz-Trigo et al. 2020 and 2024, see "related works" below) and one final report which is available from the ESO (European Southern Observatory) development study web page https://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/alma/development-studies.html#internalstudies .

assess_ms 3 takes your ALMA data in the form of CASA "MeasurementSets" (see https://casa.nrao.edu ) and produces diagnostic output as plots (png files) and text files.

Please find more complete documentation in the file

     assess_ms3.0-20250612.pdf 

which is part of the package.

If you use assess_ms 3 for your scientific publication of ALMA data, please cite the DOI of this zenodo package and/or the 2024 SPIE conference paper given in the "related works" section (Petry et al. 2024, "New methods for ALMA angular-scale-based observation scheduling, quality assessment, and beam shaping II: refinements", in Proc. SPIE 13098, "Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems X", 130980P,  https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3012662 or https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13199).

Present status (2025-06-12)

Lastest version is  assess_ms_public v3.0

consisting of

assess_ms.py v3.2, filldish.py v3.0, mshistotools.py v3.0, run_assess_ms_public.py v3.0

Software layout

assess_ms.py and run_assess_ms_public.py

assess_ms.py is a Python 3 module for use within CASA. Tested CASA versions are 6.6.1 .

The core method is

    assess_ms.assess_ms()

For the most common use cases of ALMA users, a wrapper was added with fixed parameters and comprehensive error handling:

run_assess_ms_public.py

Dependencies

To run assess_ms you need

CASA 6.6.1

    casa-6.6.1-17 (RHEL8)

    casa-6.6.1.17 (MacOS 12)

(assess_ms may also run under more recent versions of CASA but that has not been tested).

mshistotools.py , filldish.py - Python modules developed by the team of the 2020-2024 ALMA development study on uv coverage assessment.
These are included in the assess_ms distribution tarball.

All other Python modules needed by assess_ms are part of the standard CASA 6.6.1 monolithic distribution.

Furthermore, the wrapper run_assess_ms_public.py requires the package

    ImageMagick 6.9

to make the shell command line tool "montage" available.
This package is available on all Linux platforms.
On MacOS, you will need to install imagemagick and ghostscript.

See https://legacy.imagemagick.org/script/download.php

If montage is not available, assess_ms will still work but the collation of plots on a single pdf will not be done.