Partner News—Our Name Has Changed

We are now the TMT Observatory Corporation. Our name has changed. While that, in itself, is significant, what is more significant is that our prior identity was really a corporation of cooperation and best efforts, and now it is becoming a real and legal entity. We are getting ready for the future and all that lies ahead.

When TMT began, the CELT Development Corporation was formed by University of California and California Institute of Technology. These two partners, co-designers of the CELT (California Extremely Large Telescope) concept, formed a self-standing tax-exempt 501 c(3) membership corporation to enable work beyond CELT to take place with the support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This corporation defined responsibility, liability, and mission. TMT really got kickstarted when the CELT Development Corporation signed Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) with two new partners, AURA (now outside the partnership playing a supportive and management role on behalf of the National Science Foundation), and ACURA, our partner association of Canadian universities. We have carried out designs, hired staff, placed contracts, accounted for financial actions and done all of the things that large projects do through these MOU-based partner relations, employing the CELT Development Corporation's capabilities, and the separate business and legal functions of the partner institutions.

Now, in order to be ready for future phases of TMT, where even more significant commitments and deliverables will be called for, legal steps have been set in motion to recharter TMT. The first step has now been completed with signatures collected from the California and Canada partners, surrounded by august and somber lawyers, affecting a name change to the exiting corporation. A small step? Yes. Just a name change.

But quill pens are scribbling. Blotters are rocking. Wax seals are being emplaced. Or whatever arcane, but necessary tasks, lawyers and bureaucrats really do. Because the next steps are new articles of incorporation and so on. All ending sometime soon in a real and unitary legal personage. The TMT Observatory Corporation. We are becoming even more real.