Engineering the 30-Meter Telescope

yyzmcleod writes "When completed in 2018, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will be the world's largest and most powerful, with a resolving power 100 times that of Hubble. As TMT's preliminary design review nears, this article details how its enclosure, segmented mirror and adaptive optics will work to let astronomers peer back to the beginning of the Cosmos."

Comments

Thirty Meter Telescope will go a long ways!

[Celeste R]

This telescope design has a lot of promise.

My father is an optical designer/astronomer, and I grew up around many different designs that actually do work.

Why is a long telescope important? Well, once you eliminate the tube sag, it has certain properties.

This design almost eliminates ambient light (think of looking at the moon through fog compared to looking at the moon on a clear night in the mountains).

Because of this, even "tiny" 6-inch long-tube designs can match or exceed 24" or better telescopes in detail and quality. The design is out of fashion with the general public mostly because of portability and ease of use.

The design of this telescope in specific almost TRIPLES the effective length of the telescope, making the ambient light-reducing qualities much more enhanced.

Something like this would be able to look at ultra-distant objects with excellent image quality, putting spy satellite image quality to shame.

I have one caveat with this design though, I'm not very fond of the Cassegrain system because the quality of the optics is often sacrificed in the process of creating them.

Re:Yeah, but where?

[Shag]

They've narrowed it down to two sites. It's either going on Mauna Kea, or in Chile.

I was just talking to a guy today who works at an 8-meter-class telescope on Mauna Kea, and he was saying that right now, they have proposals for 7 times as many nights as there actually are available. He thought this might drop off a bit once the TMT is built, but I figure hey, the TMT is only one scope, so at most one of those 7 can go use it. The 8-10 meter guys are safe for probably a good while - Keck I is 17 years old this year, and the 30-year-old, 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope is still relevant and doing good work.

Ten years from now, maybe we have a couple 30-40 meter telescopes, but a huge amount of the serious work will still be getting done on stuff 10 meters or smaller.

Re:Yeah, but where?

[niktemadur]

They've narrowed it down to two sites. It's either going on Mauna Kea, or in Chile.

and

They haven't decided yet. Either Mauna Kea, Hawaii or Atacama Desert, Chile.

Thanks, guys. The article did not make it apparent, although many big astronomy projects nowadays end up at either site.

It's been a while since I've read about Arizona bagging a major project such as this, same with the Canary Islands. South Africa is sometimes floated around in these articles.
A possibility in my neck of the woods is the San Pedro Mountain Range in Baja California. To make the pitch more plausible, the local state government has begun installing low-glare street lighting in nearby urban areas. The Mexico City based UNAM Astronomy Institute paved 120 kms of road a couple of years ago, from sea level all the way up to the astronomical village.

So you never know where these things could end up.