Work on the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea is being threatened by a cut to the budget of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The foundation’s budget proposal, published at the end of last week, reduced its funding request from $9 bn to $3.9bn for the next fiscal year.
The foundation is also working on the $2.5bn Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile’s Atacama desert. It had already indicated that it will not be able to pay for both projects (see further reading).
The NSF said it will prioritise projects with a likely commercial return, such as AI, quantum information science, biotechnology and advanced manufacturing.
As a result, the GMT will go ahead, but “the TMT will not advance to the Final Design Phase and will not receive additional commitment of funds from NSF”.
The GMT is currently about 40% complete, and is backed by around $1bn in private funding, making the project more cost efficient, from the NSF’s point of view.
By contrast, the TMT is still in its design stage, having been held up in 2015 by legal challenges brought by Hawaiians who regard the volcano as sacred.
Fenghuan Liu, the project manager for the telescope, said his team was disappointed by the NSF’s decision, but that they remained “firmly committed to finding a path forward for TMT”. He described the telescope as “one of the most compelling American opportunities in this generation”.
The aim of the telescope is to capture light from the earliest galaxies, probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and search for life on exoplanets.
Liu said Hawaii was the best site for such a telescope in the northern hemisphere, and would enable the US to “demonstrate global leadership, while setting new standards for partnerships with the community where it wishes to be built and operated”.
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Budget tightening threatens funding for US mega telescopes Construction due to begin on Hawaii’s contested Thirty Metre Telescope Hawaiian Supreme Court approves construction of world’s biggest telescopeHawaii’s $2.4bn telescope scheme axed for lack of funds Global Construction Review.
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