30-meter telescope

Cultural, environmental impacts to be minimized

West Hawaii Today

By Erin Miller

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

If the people behind the Thirty Meter Telescope eventually choose to build on Mauna Kea, they hope to work with cultural practitioners to have the smallest impact possible on the mountain, the manager of the environmental impact statement process says.

Sandra Dawson said during the construction process, and once the telescope, referred to as TMT, was up and running, staff would work to be respectful in their use of Mauna Kea.

"How? I'm not sure," she said. "What can TMT do to respect the mountain, to be a cultural benefit? People have all kinds of ideas."

TMT would follow any protocols outlined in a yet-to-be completed Comprehensive Management Plan for the use of Mauna Kea, a task undertaken at the direction of the University of Hawaii, which has a 50-year lease on the land used by a number of international telescopes already in place. In addition to complying with the plan, TMT officials want to create educational opportunities for Big Island students, Dawson said. Possibilities range from astronomy textbooks to building a community college, all depending on input from Hawaii Island residents, she added.

The price of building such a telescope has been reported as being as high as $1.1 billion. Dawson said price estimates in

2006 showed costs of $754 million for a site on Mauna Kea or the other site being considered, which is in Chile.

Community members were to get their first opportunity to start providing input on Monday evening in Kapaau, when Dawson, at least two astronomers and representatives of TMT hosted the first in a series of seven public meetings. The October meetings begin the scoping process for the EIS; comments collected will be used to identify the community's concerns about the project.

Already available for public view is the EIS for the other site TMT officials are considering in Chile. Dawson also managed that project, and said she is neutral in composing the statements. Differences between Mauna Kea and Cerro Armazones in Chile's Atacama Desert include elevation (Mauna Kea's summit is higher), temperature (Mauna Kea is cooler) and vegetation (nothing grows on Cerro Armazones, Dawson said). Another difference is in the cultural view of the two mountains.

At Cerro Armazones, there are "no people, no history," Dawson said.

Instead, the need for infrastructure -- roads, electricity and the ability to bring water and remove waste water -- are the key concerns with that parcel of land, which is also owned by a university. Cerro Armazones is more difficult to reach than Mauna Kea, nearly 12 hours by plane from Los Angeles to Santiago, Chile, followed by a two-hour flight to a smaller airport, completed with a two-hour drive to the mountain, Dawson said.

Proposed by the University of California, California Institute of Technology and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy, the telescope would have a resolution many times greater than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. That possibility is exciting for Anneila Sargent, an astronomy professor at CalTech.

"I see this as a huge educational tool," Sargent said. "We can investigate all sorts of areas of interest to us. We can see echoes of how our origins began."

TMT would be able to gather nine times more light than that currently recorded by the Keck telescope, and be able to take images three times sharper than Keck, University of California at Irvine Assistant Professor Elizabeth Barton added.

Public meetings are scheduled for the following locations: Kahilu Town Hall, Waimea 5-8 p.m., Wednesday; Kealakehe Elementary School cafeteria, Kona, 5-8 p.m. Thursday; Ka'u High and Pahala Elementary School cafeteria, 6-9 p.m. Monday; Keaukaha Elementary School Cafeteria, Hilo, 6-9 p.m. Oct. 14; and Pahoa High School, Puna, 5-8 p.m. Oct. 15.