Top Highlights

WELCOME to the TMT e-newsletter!

• Mirrors: Building a telescope is all about mirrors! And in the case of the TMT, there will be many of them:  492 segmented mirrors, finely assembled together in a honeycomb to make the perfect hyperboloidal shape of a 30m primary mirror, all acting as a single sheet of glass of ultra-high quality and precision. This doesn’t include the essential secondary and tertiary mirrors, which will fold the light and focus it onto the science instruments. Out of the 492 mirror segments that will make the primary, more than 300 mirror blanks have already been cast, and several of them have even started to get polished.

• Telescope structure and enclosure: These critical systems have both reached the final design stages and part of these systems have already been built at our partners’ facilities to test the construction processes and quality of the parts. 

• Instruments: The TMT will have three instruments delivered at – or close – to its science “first-light,” now planned for late in the next decade. [Note that we define “first-light” as the time when all 492 segments of the primary mirror have been installed, phased and aligned, the adaptive optics system NFIRAOS and the science instrument IRIS both integrated and delivering an improved image quality in comparison to a seeing-limited instrument.] One of the first-light instruments, IRIS, has entered the final stage of its design. The beam of near-infrared light that will feed IRIS will first be corrected by TMT's Adaptive Optics facility NFIRAOS, which has nearly completed all of its requirements for passing its final design stage. Another instrument, WFOS, which unlike IRIS, will be a seeing-limited instrument working at visible wavelengths, has gone through a major downselect process of its optical design and is starting its conceptual design phase. WFOS is also expected to be delivered at first-light. The third first-light instrument will be MODHIS, a high-resolution spectrograph fed by NFIRAOS, and whose main science goal will be to characterize the atmosphere of exoplanets.

• Community Engagement:TMT is in the community on a regular basis, at events like AstroDay and Ellison Onizuka Day on Hawaii Island. We’re in the classrooms teaching our keiki about STEM and astronomy. And we’re in those communities affected by last year’s Kilauea eruption and devastating storms. We’re also giving students a boost so they can reach STEM-related careers that support them to live, work, and thrive in the islands through the THINK (The Hawai‘i Island New Knowledge) Fund. Since its establishment in 2014, the THINK Fund has committed more than $5.1 million dollars for student scholarships and grants to schools and nonprofits on Hawaii Island.