The Japanese parliament indicated strong national backing for the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope project on Mauna Kea last month when it passed a fiscal year 2013 budget that includes about $12.2 million in design and construction funds for the project.
The Japanese parliament indicated strong national backing for the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope project on Mauna Kea last month when it passed a fiscal year 2013 budget that includes about $12.2 million in design and construction funds for the project. Japan is one of the TMT project’s five international partners.
“We welcome the support of the Japanese government,” said Masahiko Hayashi, the Director General of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), a collaborator on the TMT project. “With these funds, the TMT project will make important strides this fiscal year toward one day becoming the most advanced and powerful optical telescope on Earth.”
TMT is a segmented mirror telescope consisting of 492 mirrors that combine to form the 30-meter primary mirror. Multiple countries will contribute to the construction of the 492 segmented mirrors. This latest round of funding follows a fiscal year 2012 budget from the Japanese government that designated funds for producing mirror blanks, and for development and verification of the technology and the detailed design of the telescope system.
Japan is expected to manufacture the main telescope structure and the mirror blanks for the segmented primary mirror, and to provide a portion of the polishing of the segmented mirrors and instrumentation. In total, Japan is expected to contribute about one-fourth of the total cost of TMT construction, expected to reach at least $1 billion.
“The Japanese government’s endorsement of the TMT project is an important step in the construction of TMT, providing the necessary funding for key elements of the telescope,” said Edward Stone, the Morrisroe Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology and vice chair of the TMT board.
