Adaptive Thirty Meter Telescope Sees Progress

Hugh Pickens writes "Caltech and the University of California have been making progress toward the development and construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) with the recent $200 million commitment from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The core of the TMT Observatory will be a wide-field, alt-az Ritchey-Chretien telescope with a 492 segment, 30 meter diameter primary mirror, a fully active secondary mirror and an articulated tertiary mirror. TMT will be the first ground-based astronomy telescope designed with adaptive optics as an integral system element that will sense atmospheric turbulence in real-time, correct the optical beam of the telescope to remove its effect, and enable true diffraction-limited imaging on the ground. TMT will have 144 times the collecting area of the Hubble Space Telescope and a spatial resolution at near-infrared and longer wavelengths more than ten times better, equivalent to observing above the Earth's atmosphere for many observations at a fraction of the cost of a space-based observatory. TMT will reach further and see more clearly than previous telescopes by a factor of 10 to 100 depending on the observation and will be a fundamental tool for the investigation of large-scale structure in the young universe including the era in which most of the stars and heavy elements were formed."

Comments

Stupid telescope names

[gumpish]

It's nice to see a telescope with an OBJECTIVE, QUANTIFIABLE name.

Just look at some of these idiotic names for serious telescopes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Telescope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Magellan_Telescope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Extremely_Large_Telescope
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope

Terms like "Large" and "Giant" don't really mean very fucking much, do they? Seems like astronomy caught more of the frat types than the other sciences.

Re:Some clarification about "adaptive optics"

[dotancohen]

The McDonald Observatory is in Texas. TFA said "TMT will be the first ground-based astronomy telescope...". Emphasis mine.