India along with Japan, the US, China and Canada will start work on the world’s biggest telescope on Hawaii Island that will enable to identify an object as small as coin from a distance of 500 kms.
The 30-meter telescope will be established near the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano with a cost of $1.4 billion.
The construction is expected to be completed by March 2022. Japan is expected to cover about a quarter of the construction costs.
To mark the start of construction, 100 astronomers and officials from the five countries are scheduled to attend a ceremony on October 7 at a location 4,012 meters high on Mount Mauna Kea.
The telescope will be larger than Japan’s Subaru Telescope, one of the world’s biggest, which was also built on the summit of Mauna Kea and started observation in 1999.
The Subaru Telescope’s single main mirror measures 8.2 meters in diameter, while the new telescope will be composed of 492 hexagonal mirrors, each measuring 72 cm across.
The telescope’s light-condensing capabilities will be 13 times greater than the Subaru telescope’s, enabling the identification of an object as small as a coin from a distance equivalent to 500 kms.
Astronomer Masanori Ie, a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan who leads the Japanese team on the project, said the new telescope will broaden the understanding of the cosmos.
A telescope with greater light-condensing capabilities can search for stars that are less bright or farther from Earth. The most distant and oldest star observed to date was born some 800 million years after the Big Bang.
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