US-ELTP Events and Activities
The US Extremely Large Telescope Program illustration - Image Credit: GMTO/NOIRLab/TIO
US-ELTP Astro2020 Brochure (PDF 4.9mb)
The National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab), the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization, and the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory (TIO) are working collaboratively to develop a U.S. Extremely Large Telescope Program.
The vision of the U.S. Extremely Large Telescope Program is to allow scientists to look more deeply and more precisely into the night sky than ever before. The dual hemisphere model will provide access to 100 percent of the night sky to make the next generation of discoveries about our universe.
The US-ELT Program will provide access to all night time sky and a unique suite of instruments to the US science community.
The combined apertures of TMT and Giant Magellan Telescope are comparable to that of the single European ELT, but for many scientific programs, access to two telescopes and a diverse instrument suite offers clear advantages. All-sky coverage enables observation of relatively rare phenomena (e.g., the number of observable rocky planets in the habitable zone is predicted to be small), unique targets in each hemisphere (e.g., Magellanic Clouds in the Southern Hemisphere, Andromeda group galaxies in the North), and key survey fields with unique multiwavelength data sets (e.g., GOODS-North and -South; LSST Deep Drilling fields; the Kepler main survey field; ecliptic pole deep survey regions for TESS, Euclid, WFIRST and JWST).
Sky coverage provided by the bi-hemispheric US-ELT Program
