Intel founder Gordon Moore and his wife, Betty, have donated 200 million dollars to Caltech and the University of California to build the largest optical telescope in history, according to DPA quoting a statement Thursday. The device will have a mirror measuring 30 meters across and will cost as much as 300 million dollars to build. Special technology will allow the Thirty-Meter Telescope, as it is called, to achieve higher resolution than that of the Hubble Space Telescope, enabling it to analyze light from the first star system born after the Big Bang and study the formation of planets and galaxies. Planning and design are expected to be completed by March 2009, with construction to begin soon after. Completion is expected in 2017. Five sites are being considered for the installation, said project manager Gary Sanders of Caltech. Those include three sites in Chile, one in Baja California and one on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The plan is to select the site by next May, he said. The technology will be similar to that used in the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, currently the largest optical telescopes in the world. The new telescope will feature a large central mirror comprising 492 individual hexagon-shaped mirrors, each about 1.40 meters across. The telescope will also feature adaptive optics that will allow it to minimize distortions caused by atmospheric turbulence. Six laser beams will create bright "artificial stars" in a naturally occurring layer of sodium atoms high in Earth's atmosphere. Since they will have a known intensity, electronics will allow a small "deformable" mirror in the instrument's light path to fluctuate 800 to 1,000 times per second to correct for the turbulence.
