The overlapping observing coverage of the US-ELTP provides US astronomers with unfettered all-sky access from the Giant Magellan Telescope in the Southern Hemisphere and the Thirty Meter Telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. The timezone separation between the sites will increase the system’s capabilities for time-domain astrophysics.
TMT Project Manager Fengchuan Liu and Education, Outreach, and Broader Impacts Manager Yuko Kakazu gave presentations at the International Astronomical Union Asia-Pacific Regional Meeting (APRIM 2023) held from 7–11 August, in Koriyama City, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan.
U.S. Representative Judy Chu of California visited the TMT Lab in Monrovia in August 2023. TIO Executive Director Bob Kirshner and other project team members were on hand to talk about the project's development and showcase the work going on in the lab.
Sergio Salata, Astronomy Project Manager of Added Value Solutions (AVS) in Tenerife visits the TMT office. Sergio (far-right) joins a group of Caltech astronomy summer undergraduate research students, led by Prof. Matthew Graham (center), Project Scientist for the Zwicky Transient Factory, and visits the TMT lab. in California on 20 July 2023.
TMT edge sensors will align and stabilize the relative out-of-plane degrees of freedom (piston, tip, and tilt) of each 492 hexagonal mirror segment that forms the 30-meter TMT primary mirror.
The sensor dust boots are designed to keep the sensors clean and dry. Functionality of the sensors dust boots is verified on the segments mounted on the Multi Segment Integration & Test facility at TMT lab.
Sr. Optical Engineer & Group Leader of the M1 Optics at ITOFF S. Sriram (from left) along with optics team members Chetan C (Sr. Optics Technician), T. Nataraj (Sr. Optics Technician), Sanjeev Jha (Optical Engineer), Pramod Panchal (Optical Engineer), Remya B S (Sr. Optics Technical Assistant), Devika Divakar (Scientific Associate), Alikhan Basheer (Optical Engineer).
Commissioning of TMT’s Primary Mirror Segment Polishing and Metrology Equipment in India -
The Thirty Meter Telescope is shown at a very low elevation angle. The segmented primary mirror reflects the Milky Way and convex secondary mirror. The tertiary mirror in the center of the primary mirror is oriented to send light to the Wide Field Optical Spectrograph, the gray structure located on the right side of the image. The left and right instrument platforms are seen and the dark blue adaptive optics enclosure is seen on the upper left on the instrument support structure.
An illustration for the US Extremely Large Telescope Program (US-ELTP).
TMT’s REFR-A Refrigerant Cooling Unit is placed in the summit utility room and includes the green compressors, red oil separator, condensers, CO2 receiver tank, control electronics etc.
TMT’s main cooling units REFR-A, REFR-S and REFR-H are installed at ground level in the summit observatory utility room. The Refrigeration Cooling System (REFR) also provides all of the CO2 piping that supplies the hydrostatic bearing system heat exchanger, as well as the REFR-A and REFR-S client systems located on the telescope structure.
