Future development goals for CASA single-dish data reduction

The top development priority for CASA single-dish data reduction is the conversion to the MeasurementSet format for the full reduction process. Dispensing with the ASAP (scan table) format will help unify data processing by providing a more homogenous basis for data processing, reduction, and analysis, as well as streamline and make more versatile the development aspects; current and future developers need only be familiar with one overall format of data. As such, ASAP will be gone in 5.1. However, please note that the importasap task is the only exception and will not go away even after removing ASAP. This task supports importing existing scantables in CASA for backward compatibility.

There is also significant active development to add header information to plots made by plotms. While preserving the multi-plot capability and building a layout that will not cramp or obfuscate the plot output, header information (i.e. target name, frequency, integration time, etc.) can be optionally added to the plots output by plotms.

There are a number of additional improvements that we do not detail here. ALMA-related development requests and bug notices can be sent to the CASA Single Dish Team via the ALMA Helpdesk.