THIRTY-METER TELESCOPE FOCUS OF GOVERNOR’S MEETING

Governor Linda Lingle is meeting with the Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara today to discuss the possibility of locating the planned Thirty-Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The project is a partnership between UCSB, the California Institute of Technology, AURA and an organization of Canadian universities.  Mauna Kea is one of two candidate sites under consideration for the $1 billion telescope-the other is in Chile’s Atacama Desert.  Cultural sensitivities to the site location on Hawaii island was one of the hot topics raised during the island’s mayoral elections in November.

(Posted:  9:25 a.m. Friday, December 19, 2008 by Wendy Osher, Pacific Radio Group)

(Image Courtesy: tmt.org, An artist’s concept showing the segmented primary mirror, which has 492 hexagonal segments arranged into an f/1 hyperboloidal mirror)