Thirty Meter Telescope
TMT • Missions & Center • In Development
Overview:
TMT is a telescope under development with a 30-meter, filled aperture primary mirror composed of 492 x 1.46-meter segments. Instruments and an adaptive optics (AO) system will be housed on two large, stable Nasmyth platforms. TMT will have a broad suite of capabilities ranging from wide-field, multi-object, seeing-based spectrometers to instruments that operation at the diffraction limit of the telescope behind a high-performance AO system.
The TMT design has been under development since 2003 and is now technically mature. With the completion of the Design Development Phase in March 2009, the project entered the Preconstruction Phase, and is ready to enter the Construction Phase at the Mauna Kea site in April 2014.
The TMT project is an international partnership involving Canada, the USA, Japan, China, and India. It represents a unique combination of technical, industrial, and scientific collaboration that benefits all partners. Sited near existing, complementary facilities on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, TMT will unite the Pacific Rim astronomical community about its vantage point, and will exclusively provide extremely-large telescope (ELT) access to the northern sky.
IPAC's Role:
The IPAC Communications and Education team provides full education, public outreach, workforce pipeline and public communications support for TMT.
In 2013, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a cooperative agreement to TMT to explore a potential partnership between the organizations. IPAC has the role, in conjunction with NOAO, to facilite U.S. community engagement in the planning exercise, including coordinating the annual TMT Science Forum for the full international partnership.
Links:
- TMT homepage
- TMT Science Forum webpage
