Hawaii board OKs plan for giant telescope (Thirty Meter on Mauna Kea)

Yahoo ^ | 2/27/11 | AP

[NormsRevenge]

HONOLULU – Hawaii has moved a step closer to the construction of the world's largest telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea.

The state Board of Land and Natural Resources unanimously approved the plan Friday. A consortium of California and Canadian universities had applied for a permit to build the Thirty Meter Telescope on conservation land.

[calex59]

A lot of work involved in polishing a reflector that large, it will take quite some time to build the mirror.

[alice_in_bubbaland]

I thought the board was gonna release the Birth Certificate.....

[cripplecreek]

I believe there’s some sort of 36 meter optical array ground based telescope being put together now across the globe. Something like 8 separate telescopes with adaptive optics working together. Sounds like a technical nightmare but it has the advantage of being built on the ground.

I haven’t seen anything about it for a while but its expected to give us our first halfway decent optical images of some of the planets around other stars.

[Roccus]

IIRC, it will be a segmented mirror, not a single unit.

[NormsRevenge]

a co-worker sometime back moved to the Big Island and works on the twin biggies as a tech,, he's been there close to 25 years now.. I never had a chance or gumption to make a ride up there. this one looks pretty cool.

West Hawaii Today reporting on TMT

[max americana]

They claim they don’t have the resources to find Odumbo’s mythical birth certificate but a telescope...that’s a priority.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Hawaii's Big Island already has a big scope.
The entire island has special street lights so as to not interfere.

[GAB-1955]

The telescope isn’t being built by Hawaiian politicians.

I want to see First Light from this!

[bgill]

Maybe it can find the BC.

[apillar]

From the article:

Some Native Hawaiians say the construction would defile Mauna Kea's summit, which they consider sacred. Environmentalists also oppose the telescope, claiming that it would harm the rare wekiu bug.

OH NO! If this telescope is built, bugs might die and imaginary gods might be offended!!!

[FroggyTheGremlim]

The weiku bug!

[ken5050]

When the Hubbel was launched, and later fixed in space, I thought the consensus was that earth based scopes were done..the future was in orbitals copes..because they avoid the distortion of the earth's atmosphere..

Also..aren't Hawaii's active volcanoes a potential danger?

[djwright]

It is an integrated plan. They are going to release Obama’s long for BC and post it on the moon (next to the flag that Apollo left), then you build the world's biggest telescope and charge people $100 to look at the BC through the telescope.

It is the ultimate pay-per-view (paper view?)

[eclecticEel]

Yes, but then adaptive optics were invented making the Hubble obsolete. There are still good reasons to operate you telescope in space, such as the Kepler planetfinder, which stares at one region of space non-stop (something which no single Earth based telescope could do). There are also bandwidths that are completely blocked by the atmosphere, making orbiting telescopes the only way to go; but atmospheric distortions are no longer an issue.

[steve86]

Almost 500 hexagonal segments.

[MarineBrat]

I took this photo in April of 2003 from the exact summit of Mauna Kea. I'm sure there's bacteria in the soil, and there may have been insects, though I didn't see any, but basically it's like being on the Moon. It's sterile to the eye. Off in the distance are extinct cinder cones, each one red and inflamed, bringing to mind a bunch of angry zits.

Mauna Kea is a great place for telescopes... but at 13,796 feet, it's a lousy place to breathe. :)

[SES1066]

When the Hubbel was launched, and later fixed in space, I thought the consensus was that earth based scopes were done..the future was in orbitals copes..because they avoid the distortion of the earth's atmosphere.
Also..aren't Hawaii's active volcanoes a potential danger?

Things change - like the shuttle fleet going dark and the newer space-based telescopes moving to ever higher orbits. We learned just how flexible the Hubble could be after 3 upgrade missions to this 'non-maintainable' orbiting telescope, but even at that orbit (567km~), the Hubble was 'bothered' by the 'noisy' Earth. It's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope will be at Lagrange 2 site that is out beyond the Moon (1.5 million Kilometers).

Add to the mix that use time of the Hubble is timed to seconds or less and the same is for every one of the space observatories and you get a real bottleneck. Plus when the Hubble was the new kid on the block, computers and adaptive mirrors were very primitive compared till now and you start to see why new observatories are still being built on Earth.

As for active vulcanology, Mauna Kea, while considered dormant, last erupted 4,500 years ago and given it's pre-eminent height and atmospheric clarity, is thought to be worth the investment.

[rmh47]

Two points:

If built, it will not be the world's largest telescope; it will be the world's largest optical telescope.

If the builders proposed putting it on the moon, the enviros would still find some reason to oppose it. Sheesh.