The Thirty Meter Telescope Finds a Home
The Big Island of Hawai’i is getting another telescope to add to its collection of super-observatories high atop Mauna Kea. The Thirty Meter Telescope, or TMT, will be the be the most capable and advanced telescope ever constructed and consist of a 30-meter primary mirror made of 492 segments. This is nine times the collecting area of any telescope known today. It will use adaptive optics and laser guide stars to correct for the atmospheric aberration, which even on dry climate of Mauna Kea, can still be a problem on occasion.
This behemoth of a telescope will be completed in 2018, pending a lengthy process of approval on the Big Island to make sure that all cultural and political interests are satisfied with the installation, followed by construction and testing.
Before construction can begin on Mauna Kea, the TMT must submit and have approved an application for a Conservation District Use Permit (CDUP) to the Hawaiian Department of Land and Natural Resources. This will be done through the community-based Office of Mauna Kea Management, which oversees the Mauna Kea summit as part of the University of Hawai’i at Hilo.
A broad coalition of scientists, local political leaders, native groups and others have already been working together to ensure the success of the project. Once the project is up and running, it will enable astronomers to look at some of the faintest and most distant objects in the universe, with a sensitivity to wavelengths of light ranging from the ultraviolet to the mid-infrared.
I’ve been following the progress of the TMT for some time now. A few years back, I worked with the project on their funding proposal for the NSF, and got to know the project pretty well. I remember thinking that there are going to be a lot of really engaged graduate students and their professors that benefit from this telescope, not to mention the public — particularly when the “pretty pictures” start to roll out. Beyond pretty pix, however, the possibilities for doing cutting-edge ground-based science with TMT are just spectacular!
If all goes as planned, TMT will really tackle some tough topics, including a study of the cosmic “dark ages” — a time in the history of the universe when the first light sources were starting to shine and when the earliest heavy elements were being formed. The “first-light” objects are tantalizing scientists, who want to know what they were and what caused them to start shining. Not only will TMT look at this era of cosmic history, but it will work in tandem with the to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope. Of course, everything in the cosmos after the first stars began to shine is also fair game for TMT, including the formation of galaxies, the natures of black holes, their formation and influence on their environments, and the nature of planet-formation processes are also fair game for the TMT. Those are the kinds of topics that astronomers even a few decades ago could only dream about studying. When TMT comes online, they’ll have another powerful tool to tease out the details of these cosmic processes and objects.
The TMT project has already been through a $77 million design development phase, financed largely by a $50 million donation from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Canada has also contributed $22 million. Another $200 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is enabling the next steps for construction. Caltech and the University of California each have agreed to raise matching funds of $50 million to bring the construction total to $300 million, and the Canadian partners propose to supply the enclosure, the telescope structure, and the first light adaptive optics. The result of all this participation and cooperation should be some pretty ground-breaking science!