Representatives from the Thirty Meter Telescope’s (TMT’s) Wide-Field Optical Spectrograph (WFOS) team and TMT’s China partners gathered on October 16 in Beijing, China to discuss potential collaboration during the next stage of the conceptual design of WFOS.
On September 7, 2017, a TMT Primary Segment Assembly (PSA), fitted with an aluminum mirror segment, was successfully installed into the Multi-Segment Integration & Test (MSIT) facility at the TMT lab in Monrovia, California. This is the first time a PSA has been integrated into hardware in a way that accurately reflects how the segments will be installed into the final mirror cell of the Thirty Meter Telescope.
An integral piece of the Thirty Meter Telescope’s Multi Segment Integration and Test facility (MSIT) has just been delivered to California. Traveling for a month between Osaka, Japan and California, the primary mirror prototype is soon to be delivered to the TMT laboratory in Monrovia.
In the Himalayan foothills near Naintal, India, stands the largest single-mirror optical telescope in Asia: India’s new Devasthal Telescope, designed and built under the joint leadership of the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), the Indian Institute for Astrophysics, and the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research.
Last month, the Thirty Meter Telescope successfully completed the Test Results Review of the Telescope Tertiary Mirror (M3) Prototype. Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP) engineers presented a series of tests on the M3 prototype, which received full approval from the members of the multinational review panel. As a result, CIOMP is now moving into the construction phase of its...
During the week of January 26, 2015, the Thirty Meter Telescope performed a series of "shake tests" in El Segundo, California. A major earthquake was simulated to confirm that the telescope's mirror segments would survive without damage.
One of the most important milestones in the development and construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is the precision polishing of TMT’s primary mirror segments. Each of the 492 hexagonal segments, which measure 1.44 meters across from corner-to-corner, must have a surface that is accurate to 100 nanometers (about 1,000 times thinner than a sheet of paper).
When the 10-meter Keck I telescope first became fully operational in 1992, the only planets known to exist were those in our own solar system. Models of planet formation dutifully reproduced the nine known examples, and most astronomers thought that when other planets were finally seen, those solar systems would look like our own, with giant Jovian planets in the outer regions and small rocky planets in the inner parts.
In the world of scientific research, bigger is often better. This is especially true for astronomy, where giant telescopes are the essential tools for studying the faintest whispers of cosmic energy.
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) marked a major milestone on its way to becoming the world’s most advanced and capable optical telescope. A key part of the telescope’s adaptive optics (AO) system, which will give TMT the sharpest eye possible on the Universe, was successfully tested and is ready to become actual hardware.
