World's Biggest Telescope in the Works

Dec. 20, 2007 -- While holiday shoppers were hustling around the malls last week, astronomers were stunned to learn of a gift that will go a long way to turning one of their most fervent dreams into reality.

A charitable foundation funded by Intel co-founder Gordan Moore and his wife Betty will donate $200 million to construct what is being billed as the largest optical telescope in the world.

"It's the biggest news to hit astronomy since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched," University of California-Santa Cruz astronomer Sandra Faber told Discovery News.

The Thirty Meter Telescope, or TMT, is a $1-billion project headed by the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and two university consortiums. With contributions from the California universities totaling $100 million, plus previous gifts from the Moore Foundation and other organizations, about one-third of the cash needed to build the observatory is in hand.

"Once you have that amount of funding then other people who might be in a position to fund it tend to think 'OK, now it's real. I'm in,'" Sky & Telescope executive editor Kelly Beatty said in an interview.

Construction of the TMT is scheduled to begin in 2009, with science observations on tap for 2016. A site has not yet been selected, but project managers have narrowed the options to locations in Chile, Hawaii or Mexico.

The Moore Foundation grant puts TMT well ahead of two rival next-generation telescopes, the Giant Magellan Telescope, a 24.5-meter observatory planned by the Carnegie Institution and partners, and the European Southern Observatory's 42-meter Extremely Large Telescope.