After 10 years of delay, the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope may finally get built — in Spain

A long-delayed project to build the largest telescope in the Northern Hemisphere on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii has been given new life. Spain offers new funding and a new location on the island of La Palma.

International Thirty meter telescope (TMT) was to be built along with a number of other astronomical telescopes at an altitude of 4205 meters on the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. But the mountain sacred to native Hawaiiansand by attempting to proceed with the project while ignoring the environmental and cultural significance of the area, construction was stopped before it could begin and costs skyrocketed.

Spain has already made an offer 400 million euros ($648 million) to help build TMT to the top Rock boys on the island of La Palma, part of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. There are already more than 20 astronomical telescopes at an altitude of 2,396 meters, but it is not as high as Mauna Kea and the weather is not as good.yes, but that's how it is good second option.

However, the Canary Islands environmental group, Ben Magek – Environmentalists in Actionalso talked aboutBut there is opposition to moving the project to Spain, so it remains to be seen whether the TMT organizers have learned from their past mistakes, which is cheaper and easier to get everyone involved.

In the world of telescopes, size matters. The larger the primary mirror, the more light it can collect, allowing you to see more distant and dimmer celestial objects. Ever since Galileo pointed his small hand-held telescope at the moon in 1610, the instruments have become larger and larger, their five-meter-diameter hard glass mirrors larger and larger.

For comparison, the largest telescope in Canada, David Dunlap Observatory in Ontario there isThe mirror is only 1.88 meters in size.

With the advent of segmented mirrors, using hexagonal pieces that fit together like glass puzzles, telescopes have grown to enormous sizes, with baseball-sized mirrors capable of scanning the sky with 200 times the power of current ground-based telescopes.

TMT is one of three such “megatelescopes” in development, but the only one in the Northern Hemisphere. Extremely large telescope (ELT) and Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) both will be based in Chile.

Planning for TMT began more than two decades ago. Several groups and countries came together to fund the project. including Canadawhich contributed $243.5 million under Stephen Harper's government in 2015. From the beginning, Mauna Kea was considered a prime location due to its high altitude above most clouds and its location in the center of the Pacific Ocean, where the sky is clear most nights of the year.

However, the current observatories on the mountain, which were mostly built from 1967 to 1999, were built without the approval of Native Hawaiians, who consider the mountain sacred. This time the indigenous communities were able to take a positionand block construction at the site since 2014.

This delay increased the cost to US$3.9 billion and left the project in limbo.

Another blow to TMT was recent withdrawal of US support after the current administration sharply cut spending for the National Science Foundation in May. Instead, the decision was made to focus efforts on the launch of GMT in Chile.

It may seem strange to build giant telescopes on earth when James Webb Space Telescope looked further into space and further in time than any telescope in history. But these new instruments, with huge mirrors six times larger than Webb's, should match or exceed his performance.

Another advantage of ground-based telescopes is that they can be regularly maintained, extending their lifespan by many decades, and new instruments can be added as technology advances. Webb is completely out of reach on the other side of the moon and is expected to last another ten years, depending on when its fuel runs out.

The delays and spiraling costs of the TMT project underscore the importance of involving indigenous peoples in the planning of megaprojects on their lands. We have similar situation in Canada with proposed pipelines from Alberta crossing home soil in British Columbia. If consultation is not part of the initial planning, multi-billion dollar projects can end up taking much longer and costing much more.