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posted by cmn32480 on Friday December 04 2015, @11:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the they-will-just-have-to-hubble-along dept.

From Nature.com:

Hawaii's supreme court has ruled that the construction permit for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on top of the mountain Mauna Kea is invalid. The 2 December decision is a major blow to the international consortium backing the US$1.5-billion telescope, and a win for the Native Hawaiians who have protested against its construction on what they regard as a sacred summit.

And the top reddit comment on the article, which I found neatly summed up the situation.

I spent time in Hawaii and talked to locals that were born and raised there about this issue. Its polarizing.

People against it brought up the need for spirituality and respect for the Hawaiian culture lost over hundred of years of Western influence.

Argument for the telescope, however, claimed that building it would do nothing but respect their history. How did the ancient Hawaiians get to the island? They used the stars. It was "in their blood" to understand the heavens. Most of the those complaining are young disenfranchised people struggling in one of the crappiest economies in America.

Of course this could be a generalization based on second hand observation.

As for me, as big as these telescopes are, they look like ants on top of these massive volcanoes. Ruining the scenery is nonsense.

We covered the Groundbreaking for World's Largest Telescope nearly a month ago.


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2015, @02:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 05 2015, @02:06AM (#272049)

    You'd think that, but there are two things you want out of a telescope: sensitivity and resolution. While the atmosphere causes problems with resolution that we're working on fixing with adaptive optics, there's no substitute for mirror area when it comes to sensitivity. With area comes weight, and weight is a big problem for anything in outer space. That's why these adaptive optics experiments can compete with space based stuff.

    You also have the interesting problem of trying to couple a camera with enough pixels that aren't too large or too small to these things. All that extra resolution doesn't do you any good if the image is pixellated, so, in order to keep weight down, your telescope is likely to have a smaller field of view the greater the resolution. The James Webb Space Telescope, for example, will have a field of view that's about 1/30th of a degree by 1/30th of a degree (about 1/15th the full moon).

    Speaking of JWST, that's a much better comparison. For a mirror that's specced at 6.5 meters it has cost around $9 billion. Now, JWST also has the advantage that an infrared telescope in space doesn't have to worry as much about the whole earth, sky, and telescope glowing in the wavelengths your trying to observe, so it has those advantages. It's disadvantage is that it will only carry enough fuel for 10 years of operation, and won't be serviceable the way Hubble was. Though for the cost of trying to service the old one you could probably launch a new one.

    Worse, the dust on the moon would be a problem for the machinery and mirrors. Why spend the extra fuel needed to land the observatory when it will be happier in orbit? The only reason for the moon to be between an observatory and Earth is to block out radio noise, and even then I'd think it would be better at the the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point. Otherwise, your observatory is much better off at Earth-Sun L2 where it's out of the sunlight, or in Earth orbit. The Spitzer Space telescope, interestingly, is in orbit around the sun, the distance between it and Earth slowly growing over time until they'll meet coming around the other side.

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