Following the successful conclusion of the Thirty Meter Telescope’s Environmental Impact Statement and Final Design Review of the observatory enclosure, TMT worked with acclaimed science animator and producer Dana Berry on a new, more accurate set of renderings of the observatory and its support building as they will appear on Mauna Kea.
The Thirty Meter Telescope’s (TMT) primary mirror has much in common with the 10-meter mirrors on the Keck telescopes.
One of the most important milestones in the development and construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is the precision polishing of TMT’s primary mirror segments. Each of the 492 hexagonal segments, which measure 1.44 meters across from corner-to-corner, must have a surface that is accurate to 100 nanometers (about 1,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper).
“We warmly welcome our Chinese colleagues, who will expand the international involvement in the Thirty Meter Telescope Project,” said Professor Ray Carlberg, the Canadian Large Optical Telescope project director and a TMT board member. “This new collaboration broadens the pool of talent and demonstrates the interest of national governments in TMT.”
To ensure that the site chosen for TMT would enable the telescope to achieve its full potential, a global satellite survey was conducted, from which five outstanding candidate sites were chosen for further ground-based studies of atmospheric stability, wind patterns, temperature variation, and other meteorological characteristics that would affect the performance of the telescope.
In the world of scientific research, bigger is often better. This is especially true for astronomy, where giant telescopes are the essential tools for studying the faintest whispers of cosmic energy.
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) marked a major milestone on its way to becoming the world’s most advanced and capable optical telescope. A key part of the telescope’s adaptive optics (AO) system, which will give TMT the sharpest eye possible on the Universe, was successfully tested and is ready to become actual hardware.
Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and their colleagues used a rare cosmic alignment and modern adaptive optics to image a distant galaxy with similar exquisite resolution promised by the future Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). This achievement provided detailed insight into the nature of a young star-forming galaxy as it appeared only two billion years after the Big Bang, and determined how that galaxy may eventually...
After completing a worldwide survey unprecedented in rigor and detail of astronomical sites for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the TMT Observatory Corporation board of directors has selected two outstanding sites, one in each hemisphere, for further consideration. Cerro Armazones lies in Chile's Atacama Desert, and Mauna Kea is on Hawai'i Island.
The California Institute of Technology and the University of California have received a $200 million commitment over nine years from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation toward the further development and construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). Funding under this commitment will be shared equally between the two universities, with matching gifts from the two institutions expected to bring the total to $300 million. When built, TMT...
