Big telescope drawing12/11/2023 The efforts have grown into sprawling international consortiums, intense rivals for partners and other resources since birth. The two projects started up a few miles apart in Pasadena - at the Carnegie Observatories and at the California Institute of Technology, partners with the University of California - with very different ideas on how to proceed. Silva recalled, was what to do to boost one or both of the Giant Magellan and Thirty Meter telescopes. Previous panels have given projects like the Hubble Space Telescope important political and financial momentum.Īn obvious question about the survey, Dr. The 2020 survey starts this fall, when someone is chosen to lead the main committee. Once a decade, the academy convenes a blue-ribbon panel to recommend how to spend federal dollars. Otherwise, all the telescope time would be reserved for astronomers from the institutional partners in those collaborations.ĭavid Silva, director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, said the idea arose last year during discussions of an upcoming survey of astronomical priorities by the National Academies of Science. There is now a proposal afoot to fix this: According to the plan, which has many bureaucratic, academic and political hoops to leap through, the National Science Foundation would contribute a quarter of the cost of each of the two telescopes in return for access to observation time for outside astronomers. When it goes on line in 2024, it will be the largest optical telescope in the world.Ī sore point of both the Thirty Meter and Giant Magellan telescope projects is that neither has received much support from the National Science Foundation, which traditionally finances ground-based astronomy in the United States. It was originally going to be a mosaic 100 meters in diameter (formally known as the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, or OWL) it was reduced to 42 meters in diameter and now 39. It will be eclipsed a year later by another entry in the giant telescope sweepstakes: the European Extremely Large Telescope, being built by the European Southern Observatory, also in Chile. However, the Giant Magellan will start up with only four of the mirrors in place, in 2023, making it temporarily the biggest telescope on Earth. Which means that the 30-meter-class telescopes under development will be 10 times as powerful as the largest telescopes now on Earth, which have primary mirrors 10 meters across. The light-gathering ability of a telescope is determined by the area of its main, or primary, mirror. In a statement released by the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory, Edward Stone, a Caltech professor and executive director of the observatory, said the exact price of the telescope would depend on when and where it was built. ![]() ![]() Project officials themselves have declined to say how much they need. Some astronomers say the Thirty Meter Telescope, which was originally estimated to cost $1.4 billion, will now take some $2 billion to complete. You can’t wait for all the money before you begin, he added construction should start with whatever money is in hand.īoth the Giant Magellan and the Thirty Meter Telescope are hundreds of millions of dollars short of their funding goals, according to unofficial estimates from outside scientists. “It takes a generation to build a telescope,” said Charles Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a board member of the Giant Magellan Telescope Observatory, which is building a rival giant telescope in Chile.
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