Project
Manager’s Corner: A Great Year
Last January I began my series of Project Manager’s Corners. This has been my personal attempt, each month, to help you follow TMT openly and as it progresses. I began in January by looking back to the origins of the project, and I reported on our search for a mountain site, our science instruments, our tiniest and most challenging mirror. I described a major project milestone, our Conceptual Design Review. In June, TMT took its public outreach up a notch and initiated our series of monthly Newscasts. Science Nugget—The TMT "First-Light" Instruments
Two years earlier, the SAC had laid out an ambitious plan for eight instruments and four adaptive optics systems that would enable the TMT to achieve its full potential. Now, with the benefit of many months of detailed engineering analysis and cost estimating by the project team, and several reviews by panels of independent experts, a choice had to be made. What would be the most effective set of "first-light" instruments—those available when the telescope first comes on line—that could fit within the construction budget? Technology Nugget—Controlling all those Segments
In Newscast Issues 4 and 5, TMT Project Scientist Jerry Nelson described the process used to fabricate individual segments and how each of the 738 segments can be thought of as a small piece of a large 30-meter diameter monolithic mirror. One might think that once the fabrication of all 738 segments is successfully completed, all that remains is to mount them in their correct positions on the telescope and "PRESTO!" we have a 30-meter primary mirror. Unfortunately, things aren’t nearly that simple; it turns out that the "correct position" is not easily defined nor is it "correct" all of the time. Q & A
with Brent Ellerbroek Brent sat down recently with Doug Isbell to talk about the role of adaptive optics in the design of the Thirty Meter Telescope. Download Brent Ellerbroek Interview Project Office News
Partner
News—Full Canadian Funding for D&D
Phase Previous Issues View the TMT Newscast Archive. |
I
am sitting in a lounge at Vancouver airport thinking back over
a great year for TMT. I’m returning to Pasadena after a
very successful meeting of our Science Advisory Committee (SAC),
described elsewhere in this issue by our SAC Chair, Paul Hickson
of University of British Columbia. That meeting capped this great
year.
In mid-December, two dozen scientists and engineers from across
the U.S., Canada and Japan converged on Vancouver for a special
three-day meeting of the TMT Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC).
Despite hurricane-force winds that disrupted flights, damaged buildings,
and left a quarter of a million people in the dark, the meeting
went on. Under discussion was the scientific scope and vision of
the TMT project.
In designing TMT, a major challenge is how to make the 738 hexagonal
segments of the primary mirror work together to imitate a single,
nearly perfect monolithic mirror. In detail, this is a very complex
question that requires much more space to answer than available
for this one article. But we can start the discussion by looking
at a small slice of the big picture. This month, we take a close
look at the actuators that control the primary mirror.
Brent Ellerbroek is the group leader for Adaptive Optics
(AO) for the TMT project. Before joining the TMT project
office, Brent was the AO Manager for the Gemini telescopes.
¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!
TMT Visits Mexico