The aim of amplitude and flux calibration is to convert the output voltage or counts from the correlator into brightness temperature or flux density by carefully tracking the instrumental and atmospheric variations and determining accurate conversion factors. Because the adverse effects of instrumental and atmospheric variations grow rapidly with frequency, standard calibration procedures will not work well at submillimeter wavelengths. The high design goals of the MMA (e.g. high sensitivity and imaging with large dynamic range) also demand a much higher calibration accuracy than achieved by the conventional technique used at the existing millimeter arrays (about 10%). The Report of the Amplitude and Flux Calibration Working Group outlines some of the issues at hand in detail.
Last modified 15 December 98