• An official delegation from the Department of Science and Technology visited Hawai’i in the United States, to discuss “challenges” to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project.

About TMT Project

• The TMT has been conceived as a 30-metre diameter primary-mirror optical and infrared telescope that will enable observations into deep space.
• It is proposed as a joint collaboration involving institutions in the U.S., Japan, China, Canada, and India.
  • Indian participation in the project was approved by the Union Cabinet in 2014.
• It will be installed on Mauna Kea, an inactive volcano on the island of Hawaii.
• TMT’s light-collecting primary mirror will be the largest in the Northern Hemisphere.
• Its 30 meter mirror will be composed of 492 individual 1.4 meter hexagonal segments aligned to form a single light collecting surface.
• TMT will support a state of the art adaptive optics facility and supporting suite of instruments to process and analyze the light coming from its impressive primary mirror.
• It will observe wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet to mid-infrared with up to 80 times more sensitivity of today’s largest telescopes.
• India’s Role
  • India is a Founder-Member country for this project at about 10% level.
  • India’s in-kind contributions towards the project include Hardware (Segment Support Assemblies, Actuators, Edge Sensors, Segment Polishing and Segment Coating), Instrumentation (First Light Instruments) and Software (Observatory Software and Telescope Control Systems).