Native Hawaiians consider Mauna Kea a sacred site-many generations have returned to the mountain to bury the piko, or umbilical cords, of their newborn children ( piko also means “mountain summit” in Hawaiian)-and have been vocal in their opposition to building observatories there for years. In October 2014, as officials and construction crews headed to the site for the ground-breaking ceremony, a group of native Hawaiian protesters blocked their access to the summit and refused to move until the project was stopped. This story is a selection from the November issue of Air & Space magazine Buy And yet, the giant telescope may never be built. “Our challenge is developing the technology and capability to study those planets-for instance, to determine whether microbial life might have evolved on them.” These are the types of fundamental questions the TMT should be able to address. “Another frontier that needs the collecting power of a new generation of instruments is the study of exoplanets,” Stone says. Ed Stone, a Caltech physics professor and the executive director of TMT (not to mention former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory), explains why scientists are pursuing a telescope more than three times the size of the biggest one currently on Mauna Kea: “If you want to see the very first stars in the universe,” he says, “you need a telescope of this class.” Keck has been able to observe a galaxy that existed about 570 million years after the Big Bang, but it just isn’t capable of observing the most distant stars, the first ones, which formed about 400 million years after the creation of the universe. Its massive mirror will be made from 492 segments and have 81 times the sensitivity of the Keck telescopes. In 2009, Mauna Kea was chosen as the site for the Thirty Meter Telescope, a mega-observatory proposed by the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and national science agencies in Japan, Canada, India, and China. But recently, Mauna Kea has become embroiled in a dispute that could radically alter the future of astronomy, and serve as a cautionary example of what we might lose if it keeps going down this path. Collectively, this baker’s dozen of observatories has dominated ground-based astronomy for four decades. Mauna Kea is best known as the home of the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes, which saw first light in the 1990s and remain two of the largest optical and infrared telescopes in the world. The oldest telescope on site, and still the smallest, is the University of Hawaii’s 2.2-meter (7.2-foot) UH88, built in 1968. At the summit, 13 telescopes sit along a ridge of formations that have built up around volcanic vents. The tallest island mountain in the world is Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, where the thin atmosphere and absence of light pollution create some of the best observing conditions for astronomers.
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