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Man Behind The Thirty Metre Telescope
Anonymous Coward writes "Astronomer Richard Ellis of Caltech talks about the planned Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT), with nine times the resolution of the world's largest existing telescopes, which will be able to locate earth-like planets for the first time, here"
fairly weak on techinical details. Seems mostly about what the guy who designed it.
Has anyone found any quality links about the construction challenges and methods?
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
No offense to the Anonomous Coward but... (gotta love that line...)
I'm more interested in the telescope/project than the astronomer.
http://www.astro.caltech.edu/observatories/tmt/
Hmmmm.... Thorazine....
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
I thought I'd introduce some more facts into the discussion. There were, until recently, two major independent efforts to develop a 30 m optical/IR telescope:
- The California Extremely Large Telescope project, brought to you by the same folks responsible for the Keck telescopes - that is, the University of California and Caltech.
- The Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope project, by the National Observatories, headquartered in Arizona.
Both have done design studies and both came up with fairly similar designs. Given the reality that this telescope is going to cost something north of $600 million dollars when all is said and done, the two groups have recently decided to pool all their efforts, signing an cooperation agreement back in August.As part of this, both groups applied for about $35M of funding for the next stage of the development, which will involve doing more detailed design studies, simulations, and construction of subsystem mockups to test performance. The plan is after about three years of this to have a completed design and then be able to break ground around 2008 or so, and become operational around a decade from now.
Incidentally, NOAO asked for their $35M from the National Science Foundation, while the UC/Caltech team approached the Moore Foundation, Gordon Moore's philanthropic organization. So a tiny fraction of every dollar you spend on an Intel chip may someday help to make this telescope a reality!
I have to say, I get madly excited about all this stuff. Just imagine being able to see the atmospheres of other projects. Drool.
Anyway, anymore info apart from that interview?
30 metres? Ha! So you want big? I'll give you big. Link goes to a page about a proposed 100 metre telescope!
Well, technically, of the four major English speaking nations, three of them spell it "metre." (And "colour," "armour," etc). Three-to-one, metre wins.
One superpower, one vote.
You, for one, should welcome your new imperial overloards.
We're making our lists, we're checking them twice.
Would you rather be sorted as 'naughty' or 'nice'?
We're one Santa who you don't want coming down your chimney. Ho ho ho!
Mind you I honestly don't care how things are spelled as long as the purpose of language is achieved and the communication occurs.
But with that said...
Do you really want to set a precedent here that simple majority should rule on setting standards.... *shudder* And I do speak from knowledge as I come from the american bible belt.
Donuts Thorazine
mmmm Thorazine....
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
I've gotta admit I've got a slight case of telescope envy.
it seems like pretty soon we're going to run into a practical imaging limit for earth-based telescopes, with atmospheric interference limiting what we can see. if it weren't for the huge expense involved in it, it would benefit us so much more to have something like this up in space. maybe in orbit, or on the other side of the moon or something.
:)
of course, having it up in space means you can't go hang out at the observatory scanning the heavens.
i have to say though, this thing puts my telescope to shame