Feature Story
Stunning Breakthrough for Gemini Telescope Points Way for Thirty Meter Telescope
01.05.2012
Ground-based astronomy has taken a big leap forward today as the Gemini South telescope unveiled the first ultra-sharp image produced using a next-generation adaptive optics system. The Thirty Meter Telescope will use a similar, even more advanced system when it goes into operation later this decade.
Astronomers rely on adaptive optics to cancel out the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere. Such systems use lasers to create reference "artificial stars" in the sky along with deformable mirrors to keep an astronomical object of interest in focus.
Now, the 8-meter Gemini South telescope has upped the ante by using five artificial stars, plus a technique called multi-conjugate adaptive optics to allow a wider field of view than in the past. The TMT will begin with six and expand to use nine stars in its adaptive optics system, which now has had a tremendous validation given Gemini's results.
"Gemini has blazed the trail showing that TMT's wide field adaptive optics system will work and will achieve the full sharpness that TMT promises," said Gary Sanders, TMT project manager.
Read more from Sanders on how TMT's adaptive optics system will build on the Gemini South system, called GeMS (Gemini Multi-conjugate adaptive optics System), in the TMT Segments newsletter: http://www.tmt.org/news-center/making-your-own-stars.
For more information about the image unveiled today, read the press release from the Gemini Observatory: http://www.gemini.edu/node/11715.
TMT is the next-generation astronomical observatory that will be located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The TMT project is an international partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Department of Science and Technology of India.