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posted by martyb on Friday August 30 2019, @01:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-Chile? dept.

Despite years of legal battles and months of protests by Native Hawaiian opponents, the international coalition that wants to build the world's largest telescope in Hawaii insists that the islands' highest peak—Mauna Kea—is the best place for their $1.4 billion instrument.

But just barely.

Thirty Meter Telescope officials acknowledge that their backup site atop a peak on the Spanish Canary island of La Palma is a comparable observatory location, and that it wouldn't cost more money or take extra time to build it there.

There's also no significant opposition to putting the telescope on La Palma like there is in Hawaii, where some Native Hawaiians consider the mountain sacred and have blocked trucks from hauling construction equipment to Mauna Kea's summit for more than a month.

But Hawaii has advantages that scientists say make it slightly better: higher altitude, cooler temperatures, and rare star-gazing moments that will allow the cutting-edge telescope to reach its full potential.

"Every once in a while at Mauna Kea, you get one of those magic nights," said University of California, Santa Cruz astronomy and astrophysics professor Michael Bolte, a Thirty Meter Telescope board member. "When the air is super stable above the site, you get images that you simply couldn't get anyplace else."

Bolte, who has used existing Mauna Kea telescopes, said those "magic" Hawaii nights could hold discoveries that might be missed in La Palma.

[...] But John Mather, an astrophysicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Big Bang theory, says there are other ways to get that data.

Mather, the senior project scientist for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, planned for launch into space in 2021, said the new instrument will be extremely effective at gathering infrared light. The atmosphere won't get in the way of the telescope's imaging capabilities because it won't be on Earth.

Data from the Webb telescope can be combined with information from other Earth-based telescopes to compensate for the infrared advantage that Mauna Kea has over La Palma, Mather said.

[...] Mauna Kea stands nearly 14,000 feet (4,300 meters) above sea level, more than twice as high as the Spanish site that is already home to the world's largest optical telescope. Like Hawaii's Big Island, the Spain site has good weather, a stable atmosphere and very little light pollution.

Thirty Meter Telescope would be a next generation model that's expected to transform ground-based astronomy—allowing scientists to see deeper into space than previously possible. Its large mirror will produce sharper, more detailed images of space.

"You can get images that are 12 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope," Bolte said.

And most of the same science planned for Hawaii would still get done in Spain—it would just take longer.

"Depending on the kind of science you want to do, it's going to be a 10% hit to a 50% hit in speed," Bolte said. "You are going to have to observe that much longer at La Palma to get the same quality data."

José Manuel Vilchez, an astronomer with Spain's Higher Council of Scientific Research and a former member of the scientific committee of the Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands, said that building the telescope on La Palma would not be a downgrade.

[...] Vilchez also said there is greater public support for the telescope in Spain and that the cost of operating it at a lower elevation would be cheaper.

On Mauna Kea "you are further away from the base and the cost goes up," Vilchez said. "In the Canary Islands the institutional support is 100% and 99% of citizens support the astronomy work."

That lack of opposition is something officials cannot claim for Mauna Kea.

Wikipedia has a Comparison of Optical Telescope Primary Mirrors which graphically depicts the relative sizes of many significant telescopes. The largest telescopes are compared at the extremely large telescope page. Especially worthy of mention are the 24.5 m Giant Magellan Telescope under construction at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile; the 30.0 m Thirty Meter Telescope which has been approved for construction at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii (the focus of this article); and the 39.3 m Extremely Large Telescope which is under construction at the Cerro Armazones Observatory in Chile.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 30 2019, @12:20PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 30 2019, @12:20PM (#887719) Journal

    You recon you'll get the same precision from a flimsy mirror film pushed by the solar wind.

    I reckon we could get one to two orders of magnitude better precision than that. At the higher end, that's starting to push into extreme ultra-violet, and the limits of what we can reflect.

    Positioning of mirror within 20nm when your entire aperture is 1km is size?

    Or much larger than 1km in size. And the answer is "yes".