Construction of the world's largest telescope has shifted from the dead center

The construction of this telescope media wrote five years ago. But only in 2014, the case finally moved from a dead end. The government of the Hawaiian Islands has given the go-ahead to rent the necessary land for the construction of a telescope, and the start of construction is scheduled for April this year.

Scientists call this telescope among themselves TMT, which is an abbreviation of the English phrase “thirty-meter telescope”. The telescope mirror does indeed have a diameter of about thirty meters, and it consists of a little less than 500 individual segments. The resolution of the resulting image in the case of TMT is almost 10 times higher than that of the well-known Hubble. Initially, the telescope was planned to be placed on top of the currently inactive Hawaiian volcano Mauna Kea. Due to the excellent weather conditions and a huge height above the sea (more than 4,200 meters), several rather large telescopes are located at this top.

The telescope project originated in the distant 1990, but its implementation somehow did not work out right away. Of course, it's all a matter of money. The California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the Association of Canadian Universities for Astronomy Research have invested about $ 120 million in the development and design of the telescope. Despite the fact that the collected funds are coming to an end, and the total cost of the project hovers around 970 million, the researchers still want to start building already this year.

On the other hand, the development of the project was strongly hampered by the Hawaiian authorities. It turned out that a terribly rare species of Wekiu beetles threatened with extinction lives near the place chosen for the construction of the telescope. The project was suspended in the air for an indefinite time. Later it turned out that the Hawaiian High Court confused something in the papers, and there was no beetle near the construction site. But time has already been lost.

Now everything has been agreed, all the necessary documents have been signed, the lease of the land has been paid for thirty years in advance (estimated cost is $ 1 million per year) and, apparently, everything is ready for the beginning of the long-awaited construction. What comes out of this whole undertaking, we will know very soon.

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/technology/stroitelstvo-samogo-bolshogo-v-mire-teleskopa-sdvinulos-s-myortvoj-tochki.html.