With the escalating size of projects, we might soon run out of adjectives to describe future optical telescopes. At least 3 projects are on the drawing boards, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), and the 42-meter? European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The first two are driven by US collaborations while the latter is the European project. Not sure how many will be built once the dust settles. It seems that the TMT is aiming for a Hawaii site and GMT for Chile which would cover both hemispheres. The site for the E-ELT is to be decided. Will this be the final frontier in ground-based optical telescopes?. In any case, with so many telescopes coming online those tiny 10-meter telescopes will be rendered useless.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Very, extremely large, giant and also big telescopes
With the escalating size of projects, we might soon run out of adjectives to describe future optical telescopes. At least 3 projects are on the drawing boards, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), and the 42-meter? European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The first two are driven by US collaborations while the latter is the European project. Not sure how many will be built once the dust settles. It seems that the TMT is aiming for a Hawaii site and GMT for Chile which would cover both hemispheres. The site for the E-ELT is to be decided. Will this be the final frontier in ground-based optical telescopes?. In any case, with so many telescopes coming online those tiny 10-meter telescopes will be rendered useless.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment