One of the six partners involved in the Thirty Meter Telescope project no longer wants the telescope to be built on Maunakea, according to news reports.
In a Jan. 21 article in The Hindu, the second-largest English newspaper in India, the secretary of India’s Department of Science and Technology, Ashutosh Sharma, was quoted as saying that the Indian government wants the TMT project to move to a different site.
“India’s position has been clear,” Sharma reportedly told The Hindu. “We would like the project to move to an alternate site if all the procedures and permits there are in place. The difficulty is that even if construction (on Maunakea) were to go ahead, there could be future agitations.”
India’s Department of Science and Technology is one of six full partners invested in the TMT project, along with the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, the National Research Council of Canada, the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences and National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
According to The Hindu, India has committed $200 million to the project, about 10% of the proposed cost, and is currently manufacturing 83 of the 492 mirrors required to complete the TMT.
So far, no other partner has publicly advocated for moving the project from Maunakea, which is considered to be the optimal site for the telescope.
If the project were to be moved, the most likely secondary choice would be the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. While TMT officials have secured some of the necessary paperwork to build on La Palma, they said in November that Maunakea remains their preferred site.
Representatives of the project partners are expected to meet in February. Eswar Reddy, program director for the India TMT Coordination Center, told The Hindu that “by this year, we have to take a firm call on where the project has to be located.”