The present IRAM Newsletter is a combination of the May and August Version (by itself, the May edition would have been very small).
The proposal submission time limit is this time on September 11th, which was due to organisational reasons. We hope that this will cause no inconvenience for astronomers in the United States.
News from the IRAM web site: The old web server http://iram.fr has been removed, all web traffic passes now through the servers http://www.iram.fr and http://www.iram.es (IRAM Grenoble and Granada, respectively), which partially mirror each other. Please update your bookmarks and links, if you have not already done so. The final shutdown of the old server caused some surprises when the navigational icons in thousands of web pages (which had relied on the old web server as icon server) suddenly refused to work, but some automated scripts soon removed this dependency and improved the html syntax for better mirroring. Since then, the web site has grown further and is used by several IRAM groups for the daily exchange of information.
The IRAM Annual Report 2002 is now available. A scanned and OCR (optical character recognition) processed version is available under http://www.iram.fr/IRAMFR/ARN/AnnualReports/IRAM_2002.pdf, with a size of 12.4 MBytes. Printed copies are available on request.
In the recent months, the IRAM Grenoble web server has been down occasionally due to hacker attacks. An upgrade of the system, together with the installation of a search engine and webmail (with strong contributions by Sebastien BLANCHET) should reduce these problems. The Grenoble offices have also been burglared one night and computer equipment stolen, some of which was recovered later by the police. Visiting astronomers are therefore accomodated preferentially in hotels, and an intrusion alert system has been installed. Considering the recent heat wave in Grenoble and the fact that the rooms were not climatized, visitors have mostly welcomed the change.