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Space Science

Man Behind The Thirty Metre Telescope 23

Posted by timothy from the observe-your-neighbors-discreetly dept.
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"
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Man Behind The Thirty Metre Telescope More

Man Behind The Thirty Metre Telescope

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  • 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?

  • A link more informative (Score:4, Informative)

    by Wardish ( 699865 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @12:06PM (#7680475) Journal
    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/ [caltech.edu]

    Hmmmm.... Thorazine....

  • More Information on the Thirty Meter Telescope (Score:5, Informative)

    by mperrin ( 41687 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @12:11PM (#7680512) Homepage
    The original article is rather low on actual technical information, being instead just an interview with Richard Ellis, and while Richard is a great guy, he's only one of (very!) many individuals working to make the thirty meter telescope a reality.

    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:

    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 [moore.org], 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!

    • 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!

      Oh, great I can see the ads now, huge telescopic with researcher looking through something and he sees aliens, planets, all sorts of neat stuff. Then some one asks how the government can afford all this. And he points to a plack of Paid by Intel on the side of the Telescope.
  • 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?

  • Bah! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by catfry ( 730592 ) on Wednesday December 10, 2003 @12:53PM (#7680955)
    30 metres? Ha! So you want big? I'll give you big. [eso.org] Link goes to a page about a proposed 100 metre telescope!
  • 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 :)
    • Basically, adaptive optics (AO -- deformable mirrors which compensate for atmospheric turbulence) are what makes projects like this possible. That being said, projects like the European OWL (100m) telescope will need a *huge* number of actuators to get the level of mirror control necessary to eliminate most of the distortions. In fact, with a small number of AO actuators, large telescopes can actually do *worse* than with no AO system at all!

      A large chunk of the budget on these large optical telescopes w

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