The home of the Thirty meter telescope (TMT), the world’s most advanced and most powerful optical telescope, will be Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano.
Images © TMT
The University of Hawaii on Thursday approved a plan to sublease land at the summit of Mauna Kea for construction of the world’s largest optical telescope. The Board of Regents voted 15 to 1 to approve subleasing the land atop the Big Island volcano for the Thirty Meter Telescope. The university leases summit land, which hosts about a dozen telescopes in total, from the state.
When completed later this decade, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will enable astronomers to study objects in our own solar system and stars throughout our Milky Way and its neighboring galaxies, and forming galaxies at the very edge of the observable Universe, near the beginning of time.