Thirty Meter Telescope officials weren’t kidding when they said they would be looking for an alternative site for their $1.4 billion project.
Although officials have been reluctant to talk about their search, evidence of a worldwide hunt for a backup site has been popping up across the Internet.
Newspapers in India, Chile and the Canary Islands have either reported visits by a delegation of TMT officials or announced that they are coming.
“No decisions have been made as of yet,” TMT spokesman Scott Ishikawa said Tuesday.
TMT officials announced in February that they had decided to search for an alternative site in case the next-generation telescope couldn’t be built on Mauna Kea in the next couple of years.
The project — thwarted over the past year by Native Hawaiian protesters and a Hawaii Supreme Court ruling — needs a permit for construction on Mauna Kea by the end of this year or the beginning of next year, otherwise it would go to another mountain, said Ed Stone, TMT executive director.
Obtaining a permit by then would allow the TMT board to gather enough funding to launch construction in spring 2018, Stone said.
“We really need a place to build a telescope,” a frustrated Stone told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in February.
On Tuesday, Ishikawa said Hawaii’s tallest mountain at 13,796 feet continues to be the first choice for TMT. However, a variety of “Plan B” sites are being eyed, some that were previously considered as well as some new ones, he said.
“The specific sites are not being disclosed at this time,” he said.
Actually, the TMT let it slip that it was looking at the Canary Islands when pictures of a fact-finding trip were posted on its Facebook page March 21.
“TMT Board members and TMT Project Manager Gary Sanders visited the observatory site at La Palma in the Canary Islands last weekend. Beautiful site!” the caption said.
A report in the La Opinion de Tenerife newspaper said officials visited the astronomy facilities atop Roque de los Muchachos, a 7,861-foot mountain that is home to about a dozen telescopes.
The newspaper quoted Rafael Rebolo, director of the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute, as saying that TMT officials are considering four locations: two in Chile, one in Mexico and the one on La Palma. The plan, he said, is to narrow the choice to two in May and make a final decision on an alternative site in months ahead.
But over the weekend the Times of India reported that Hanle in the northern Indian region of Ladakh has been short-listed as a prospective site by the TMT board.
The newspaper said an international team with the TMT would be visiting the Indian Astronomical Observatory in the next couple of months to evaluate a site near India’s border with China.
The site, at the top of a 14,800-foot peak in the Western Himalayas, isn’t exactly convenient.
Earlier in the month Sanders traveled to Antofagasta, in northern Chile, to attend the 13th annual meeting of the Chilean Society of Astronomy. There, according to a newspaper account, astronomers embraced the possibility that the TMT might land on a peak in the nearby Atacama Desert.
The Chilean newspaper La Tercera quoted Sanders as saying TMT’s plan is to determine within two months whether the alternative site will be in the Northern Hemisphere or the Southern Hemisphere, with the aim of starting construction in April 2018.
TMT scientist Angel Otarola was quoted as saying that Chili’s Atacama Desert, considered the driest in the world, offers many attractive features for the TMT, including clear skies 90 percent of the year.
Otarola said Cerro Armazanos, Cerro Tolar and Cerro Tolonchar — three of the final five sites considered for the TMT back in 2008 —
remain strong alternative candidates for the telescope, which will be capable of seeing more than 13 billion light-years away.
The other two sites among the final five in 2008 were Mauna Kea and a 9,280-foot peak at San Pedro Martir in Baja California, Mexico.
TMT officials say they continue to wait on the state to provide a new permit process and projected timeline after the state Supreme Court invalidated the project’s permit in December.
The state’s highest court ordered a new contested-case hearing after ruling that the state Board of Land and Natural Resources violated the state Constitution by holding the hearing only after the project’s conservation district use permit was approved.
Joshua Wisch, assistant to Attorney General Doug Chin, said state officials are close to selecting a hearings officer, but offered no timeline for the proceeding, saying it would be speculation.
