Thirty Meter Telescope Project

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project is a public-private partnership that fulfills the goals of a concept called the Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope (GSMT), which was identified in the National Academy of Sciences report "Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium" as the highest-priority new ground-based facility for the first decade of the 21st century.

The goal of the TMT project is to construct an extremely large telescope based on more than 700 hexagonal-shaped mirror segments that stretch a total of 30 meters in diameter. Such a telescope also needs adaptive optics systems that compensate for natural distortions of the incoming light by Earth's atmosphere, and huge science instruments containing dozens of mirrors, detectors, and complex filters. The TMT will gather light in visible and infrared wavelengths to help astronomers answer the most challenging questions in astronomy and astrophysics, from "How do planets form?" to "What is the ultimate fate of our galaxy?"

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Telescope
• Technology
• Astronomy
• TMT
• Thirty
• Meter
• Giant
• Keck

[Airclot]

@hrr420 Right, because the feelings of a few people on a small island are more important then discovering the goddamn universe.

[xEllenMellenx]

@EUROSUN1

Hey, I totally just youtubed that, it looks so cool!

[hrr420]

if u understand what mauna kea represents to the hawaiian people u would know what im talking about

[playloud90278]

I respect the universe we live in, and it is easier to see from Mauna Kea. I don't see the harm in building telescopes.

[hrr420]

u must be another dumb haole who has no idea of respect for the land that they live on

[playloud90278]

FOAD!

Build more telescopes!

[EUROSUN1]

The Europeans are building the 42 meters E-ELT. So this thing is already a second ranking project. Not to mention if build it will be finished in 2018 or 2019 while the European E-ELT will begin operation in 2016. 2 years sooner!!!

[hrr420]

SAVE MAUNA KEA

NO MORE TELESCOPES

[anthonycarl2020]

Hubble's cost to date is around $10 billion dollars. This looks like it will cost a fraction as much and will be easier to upgrade...

[joshig1983]

SIM will likely perform much better than this 30 meter telescope because SIM could have the diffraction limited resolution of a 9 metre telescope. Even with active and adaptive optics, the 30 metre will likely have resolution less than a 5 metre scope. The only real obvious demonstrations I know of where ground based telescopes outperformed space ones was when the CHARA Array photographed the surfaces of stars like Altair and Keck beat the HST by 50% for resolution of Ceres.