TMT staff in Pasadena regularly participate in outreach events and arrange visits and events for all kinds of groups in the local area. A few notable events recently include a visit to the TMT Lab by members of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society, a visit to the TMT Project Office by the iBook Club of Pasadena and Rose City High School and presentations about TMT science and engineering at the STEM evening at Ninth Street Elementary School alongside Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles.
LA Astronomical Society visit TMT Lab. -April 2019.
iBook Club of Pasadena visit TMT Project Office - April 2019.
iBook Club of Pasadena visit TMT Project Office - April 2019.
The iBook Club of Pasadena and students from Rose City High School visited the TMT office to learn about the TMT project, the engineering and science, but importantly to visit a big workspace where people with many different skills all work together toward a common goal. The iBook Club is a group for people with communication difficulties, their families and friends. Rose City High School provides an alternate environment for students to succeed. The visitors toured the TMT office, meeting the staff and learned about the Human Resources, the financial and business groups, the IT support, the project management and the types of engineers who are working for the observatory: software, control systems, telescope structure, optics, support facilities, adaptive optics and instruments. They saw how virtual meetings are carried out between teams across the international partnership and learned how diverse the TMT staff are, from many different countries and all with very different personal stories.
TMT Presentation at Ninth Street Elementary School in LA - April 2019.
Ninth Street Elementary School held its annual STEM night recently. TMT and a range of STEM groups participated and a couple of hundred students, family members and friends attended the event. The school is in Downtown Los Angeles (LA) and serves many local students. A short presentation about cutting-edge astronomy, TMT’s future role and the story about how we’re developing and building TMT was given to rotating crowds during the event. Questions were taken and a lot of people asked about the Event Horizon Telescope images of the super-massive black hole in M87, gravitational waves. These same people might one day get to work on telescope and space projects. There was huge excitement from the Kindergarten to 5th grade students about their future opportunities to work on exciting projects across the LA region.
