The world’s largest optical telescope received approval for construction last week from the Hawaiian Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR), which granted a building and operating permit for the devices that will use a 30 meter wide segmented mirror to view phenomena 13 billion light years away.

Planned to be situated atop the Mauna Kea volcano, the Thirty Meter Telescope is expected to cost $1 billion and will make its first scientific observations by 2021.

From Cnet:

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will have a primary mirror of 492 segments measuring some 100 feet across, giving it the power to image objects 13 billion light years away, near the beginning of the universe.

It may also photograph planets outside our solar system with unprecedented detail.

The focus of a collaboration among scientists in California, Canada, Japan, China, and India, the instrument will have 144 times the light-collecting area of the Hubble Space Telescope and nearly 10 times that of one of the Keck telescopes.

The telescope will use a complex series of mirrors to focus and refocus light to compensate for the natural distortion of light by the Earth’s atmosphere.  The system aims to obtain the clarity of orbital telescopes that float above the hazy atmosphere while taking advantage of the immense size possible with grounded observatories.

The aging Hubble Telescope recently celebrated its 23rd birthday with new images of the Horsehead Nebula, while the Kepler space telescopes have been continuing their search for other planets.

The TMT gained approval despite opposition from environmental and native Hawaiian groups, but still needs to secure a lease as well as final approval from natural resources authorities in the state.

As Cnet points out, however, the TMT won’t stay the largest telescope for long, as the 137-foot European Extremely Large Telescope will also come into service in 2021.

 

You can reach Staff Reporter Shea Huffman here or follow him on Twitter.