The Thirty Meter Telescope will be the largest telescope ever built in the
northern hemisphere, but what happens when science is in conflict with culture?
Hello everyone I'm Christian Ready, your friendly neighborhood astronomer, and if
this is your first time here, welcome and please be sure to hit the Subscribe
button and tap that notification bell so that you don't miss out on any new
videos. Current plans call for the TMT to be built on top of Mauna Kea which is an
extinct volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. Mauna Kea is home to some of the
world's largest telescopes, including the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes. But it's
no understatement to say that there's real controversy surrounding whether or
not to build TMT atop Mauna Kea. Mauna Kea is the home of the Native Hawaiians'
gods and therefore is considered sacred ground for some Native Hawaiian groups.
Now we're going to talk more about the controversy surrounding TMT in just a
moment, but first let's talk a little bit about the telescope itself. In astronomy,
bigger is better. Telescopes need to be made as large as possible so as to
collect as much light as possible and therefore allow us to probe deeper and
deeper into the universe. To build mirrors larger than 8 meters across
multiple, mirrors are brought together to act as one giant mirror. For example, the
twin Keck telescopes atop Mauna Kea use 36 hexagonal segments to act as a single
10 meter diameter mirror. But TMT will combine 492 segments to form a giant 30
meter diameter mirror. Each mirror is 1.4 meters across but only 45 millimeters
thick. That's a little less than 2 inches. That
means that the mirrors are lightweight, easier to manufacture, and much easier to
remove and clean and replace as needed. Star light reflects off of the primary
mirror and bounces up to the secondary, which then redirects the light beam down
to the tertiary mirror. But this tertiary can rotate and pivot up and down to
direct the light beam into any one of the scientific instruments located on
the Nasmyth platforms on either side of the telescope.
Of course, TMT will come standard with the latest adaptive optics technology,
and this will allow the telescope to achieve a resolution that is ten times
sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope is also protected by a
special enclosure called a Calotte dome. This design was chosen to reduce
construction costs as well as to keep the overall footprint of the telescope
as small as possible. Now at night the enclosure has to be able to pivot to
allow the telescope to point anywhere in the sky it needs to, but it will also be
equipped with a sophisticated ventilation system that will keep a
uniform column of smooth air over the mirrors at all times. This will ensure
that images are free from any distortion caused by turbulence inside the dome. But
a telescope this advanced needs to be located under the clearest and driest
skies available. This is to improve something called "Astronomical Seeing" and
it's something that we talked about in a previous video. I'll have a link to it up
here so you can go check it out later. So figuring out the location for the
telescope took about five years. Several sites were considered both in the
northern and southern hemispheres. Since we're building the Giant Magellan
Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope in the high desert in
Chile, it made sense to locate TMT somewhere in the northern hemisphere.
That brought the selection down to one of two possible locations. The first is
the La Palma Observatory in the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain, the
second is near the top of Mauna Kea located on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Now Mauna Kea was selected over La Palma in the Canary Islands for several
reasons, but the most important of them is the fact that Mauna Kea is higher and
drier. Unfortunately, the placement of
telescopes atop Mauna Kea has been a sore subject for some Native Hawaiian
groups. They argued that the mountain is sacred ground and home to some of their
gods. And this is where the story gets very difficult to tell, partly out of
cultural sensitivities but also because I don't have the legal expertise to
really get into all of the details. But I'll give it a shot.
The top of Mauna Kea is an environmental conservation area.
This means that TMT had to undergo several reviews including environmental
impact statements. Following reviews and public hearings, the Hawaiian Bureau of
Land and Natural Resources issued a permit to allow construction to begin.
However, the Hawaiian Supreme Court ruled that BLNR acted prematurely and had
to wait for a contested case to be resolved before issuing the permit.
Hearings on the contested case were held throughout 2016 and early 2017. The chief
hearing officer was retired Circuit Court Judge Ricky May Amano. After four
months of testimony, judge Amano issued a 300+ page report recommending that
BLNR reissue the construction permit. After BLNR conducted its review, it
reissued the permit in September of 2017. However the case was appealed to the
Hawaiian Supreme Court on the grounds that Judge Amano was not a fair and
impartial hearing officer. By the way, that was just one of the appeals, there
was actually another appeal that was heard in March. And on June 21st of this
year, the Hawaiian State Supreme Court heard arguments on both sides regarding
the appeal. In the meantime, the TMT International Organization has started
to hedge its bets and has revisited plans to move the telescope to La Palma
in the Canary Islands if they cannot go through with building on Mauna Kea. To
that end, an agreement has been reached with the Spanish government and a
location on La Palma for TMT has been selected. So at first blush it may seem
to make sense to just pack it in and move the whole smash over
to La Palma, but there are some problems with this approach. The first has to do
with the observing conditions - they're not as good at La Palma as they are at
Mauna Kea, so TMT might not be able to fully reach its scientific potential if
it's located there. The second is, believe It or not, cultural. Hawaii is the center
of world-class astronomy and TMT would continue in that tradition. The TMT
organization donates $1 million a year for STEM education and
scholarships. Not only that, but a recent poll conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling
showed that 77% of Hawaiians favored TMT and its support among Native Hawaiians
was two-to-one in favor of the project. Now obviously it doesn't really matter
what I think, or what even the people of Hawaii think. Right now what matters is
what the Supreme Court of Hawaii thinks, and we're gonna be finding out about
that in the months to come. But as long as we're waiting for the Hawaiian court
to issue its decision, we may as well speculate about it. What do you think
should happen? Should the court agree with the protesters or agree with TMT? If
they do agree with TMT, should TMT proceeded to build atop Mauna Kea, or
should they just go ahead and move it all over to the Canary Islands? Leave
your thoughts in the comments below and I'll be sure to check them out. By the
way, if you like telescopes, I've got some more videos on some of the giant
telescopes that are under construction right over here. There's also an entire
channel, so please feel free to check it out and subscribe and be sure to hit
that notification icon so that you don't miss out on any new videos. Thank you so
much for watching, and keep watching the skies.