The entire telescope complex would stand 18 stories tall and take up almost an acre and a half. Its namesake colossal mirror, measuring 30 meters in diameter, would make it larger than any other visible-light telescope ever built. India joined the TMT consortium as a full member on 12th February 2014.The Thirty Meter Telescope was first proposed in 2003, with initial plans coming together in 2009. Artist’s rendition of TMT (Image credit: TMT Observatory Corporation)Īn international collaboration, consisting of the US, India, China, Canada, and Japan, is building TMT at an estimated cost of about $1.47 billion. The entire setup will be housed inside a huge dome of 217 feet with height of 187 feet (equivalent to the height of about 19 adult elephants!). A tertiary mirror will direct light reaching the secondary mirror into various scientific instruments. Active control means that operators can deform the shape of the mirror precisely to correct for distortions occurring in the Earth’s atmosphere. The secondary mirror will also have active control. size, which will be controlled using sophisticated electromechanical devices called actuators to achieve desired shape accurate to 100 nanometers (diameter of a human hair is about 10,000 nanometers). TMT will use 492 hexagonal mirrors of 1.4 m. Sizes of the primary mirrors of different telescopes (Image credit: Wikimedia) So, all big telescopes use segmented mirrors, wherein many small hexagonal mirrors are joined together to work as a single primary mirror of large aperture. It is impossible to build a single primary mirror of a large aperture (the current single mirrors are of 8 m. To obtain sharp images of astronomical objects, one needs to have the primary mirror surface unevenness better than 100 nanometers (which is about 1,000 times thinner than a paper sheet). The ideal place for optical telescopes are mountains, which are above clouds and provide the best atmospheric conditions for optical and infrared astronomy. This huge facility is planned, as of now, for construction on the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Once TMT is operational, it is estimated it will at least three times more sensitive than the current ground-based optical telescopes. The largest optical telescope currently operating has a primary mirror of the size of about 10 m. (which is comparable to the size of a small football field). The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a proposed international observatory with a primary mirror of the size of 30 m. A Newtonian reflector (Image credit: PiKon) A Newtonian telescope, on the other hand, uses mirrors.Ī primary mirror collects light coming from astronomical sources and directs it towards a secondary mirror from where it reaches the eyepiece. The design of telescopes varies, with the simplest being refractors, which employ lenses. For instance, light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach us, which implies that when we look at the Sun, we look eight minutes into the past. This essentially means that we are looking into the past when we observe the Sun. One must appreciate the fact that light travels at about 29,97,92,458 m/s in vacuum, which means that even though it is fast, it may require thousands of years to reach us. How Mushroom Cultivation Is Changing the Fortunes of Women in Rural IndiaĬhattisgarh's tribal communities, with limited job and economic opportunities, saw a significant chance when an organisation offered to train tribal women in starting a mushroom cultivation business.
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