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The Controversial Thirty Meter Telescope Will Resume Construction

After months of protests over building on a sacred Hawaiian mountain, a deal has been struck.

After months of protests, Hawaii governor David Y. Ige has publicly announced his support for resumed construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea's summit. With its massive primary mirror, the TMT will be able to study alien worlds, the early universe, and many other exotic targets in unprecedented detail.

"TMT has the right to proceed with construction and they may proceed as far as I am concerned," Ige acknowledged in a statement released on Tuesday. "And we will support and enforce their right to do so."

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The telescope became the subject of controversy ever since crews broke ground on the site last October. Mauna Kea is considered the most sacred mountain in Hawaiian religious tradition, and its status as a cultural landmark has sparked protests about technological development on the site for decades.

While some indigenous groups were concerned about the TMT's site selection when it was first announced in 2011, the issue didn't really heat up until construction crews showed up on the summit last autumn.

Protest on October 7, 2014. Credit: Hōkūlani Reyes.

Since then, hundreds have people have camped out on the mountain to express opposition to the telescope, and have physically blocked crews on many occasions. Some environmentalists have also joined the protests, arguing that the TMT will disrupt the fragile ecology of Mauna Kea, or even affect local water supplies—a claim that TMT leads have outright denied.

A particularly heated confrontation on April 2 led to mass arrests, which prompted Ige to temporarily shut down construction on the telescope.

The fact that he has now provisionally approved resumed work is great news for the space community, because TMT will be among the largest observatories in the world when it becomes operational around 2022. Its only rival in aperture size will be the Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) which is will have a primary mirror measuring 39.3 meters in diameter, compared with TMT's eponymous 30 meters.

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"The bigger the telescope, the sharper are the images you can make," E-ELT astronomer Jochen Liske told me last year. Indeed, both the TMT and E-ELT are engineered to detect biomarkers—compounds that suggest the presence of alien life—in the atmospheres of distant worlds.

Initially, the TMT leadership considered building the telescope in the less contentious Atacama Desert region of Chile, but decided against it after the E-ELT set up shop there. It would be redundant to have two giant telescopes surveying the same hemisphere, which is why Mauna Kea, with its pristine observational conditions and unique vantage point, is such a perfect spot for the TMT.

It's easy to sympathize with both sides of this debate, and admirably, the demonstrators and telescope leads have been generally open to finding common ground and compromise (barring a hack on the TMT's website on April 28).

Concept drawing of TMT. Credit: Courtesy TMT Observatory Corporation.

To that end, Ige didn't just steamroll the opinions of indigenous Hawaiians by allowing construction to continue. He also laid out a new series of harsh rules and restrictions for future projects on the mountain, and demanded that a huge chunk of its current observatories be shuttered and dismantled by the time TMT is completed.

"The University [of Hawaii] must decommission as many telescopes as possible with one to begin this year and a least 25 percent of all telescopes gone by the time TMT is ready for operation," said Ige.

That will be a very hard pill for the astronomical community to swallow, given how many world class facilities are located on the mountain. No doubt there will be much more controversy as Ige's plan is implemented over the next few years. If his administration actually goes through with these cutbacks, it will represent a frustrating net loss for space science. But at this point, Ige seems comfortable making that sacrifice.

"It is my own belief that the activities of native Hawaiians, and of our scientists, to seek knowledge and to explore our relationship with our cosmos and its creation can and should co-exist on the mountain," he said. "What has instead happened is that science has received most of the attention and it has gotten way ahead of culture in our work on the mountain. The proper balance between the two has been lost."