Construction of world's largest optical telescope approved

CNET ^ | Sunday, April 14, 2013 | Tim Hornyak

[beebuster2000]

$1 billion, wow. but worth it i bet.

i wonder how they make the glass that large? in pieces that focus on someting like a digital camera or something?

anhyone know how the technology works?

[Rembrandt]

Use Bill Gates’ and Warren Buffets’ money, not mine, to build this stupid thing.

[JRandomFreeper]

Too bad it's at the bottom of a gravity well under a sea of atmosphere.

/johnny

[null and void]

Paragraph 4 of the above excerpt:

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will have a primary mirror of 492 segments

[beebuster2000]

i looked at the design spec. its not glass, but a series of highly polished mirrors that all reflect onto an electrical eye that captures the image. i cant imagine the precision it must take to make the mirrors, keep them polished in the outdoors on a mountain top a nd then achieve the precision neccesary to focus over 400 of them EXACTLY so you can look out millions of light years. really cool

[Jack Hydrazine]

If we had kept going back to the Moon and established a base we could have put a telescope or three on it.

[BreezyDog]

Stupid? Really? Scared of it Rembrandt? It is modern day exploration...

[null and void]

[JRandomFreeper]

Radio telescopes on the back side. Isolation pay for the researchers. They will need a good cook. I know someone that cooks well and can stand isolation. And knows a little bit about Smith charts. ;)

/johnny

[null and void]

It is, in a word, AMAZING!

[GGpaX4DumpedTea]

Mauna Kea is a volcano. One eruption, telescope and $1 billion dollars gone...of course that is a better deal than any of Obama’s bailouts.

[RingerSIX]

...near the beginning of time.

Yeah, sure, uh huh, yep.

[diverteach]

And just what advantage and how could this top what we get from the hubble space telescope?

[Jyotishi]

Mauna Kea erupted about 4,500 years ago.

[Strategerist]

And just what advantage and how could this top what we get from the hubble space telescope?

It's much larger and thus has far more light-gathering capability than Hubble.

And adaptive optics techniques that constantly and automatically compensate for atmospheric distortion mow greatly reduce the advantage of optical space telescopes over ground-based ones.

[smokingfrog]

i wonder how they make the glass that large?

Very carefully!

[Jack Hydrazine]

The Hubble Space Telescope has a primary mirror with a with an eight foot diameter mirror. Compare this to the 100 foot mirror of this new telescope.

[Jack Hydrazine]

If they could put this telescope on the Moon just think about how far it could peer into the universe.

[smokingfrog]

http://spie.org/x31116.xml

I imagine the process is similar to this.

http://mirrorlab.as.arizona.edu/about