LOT (TMT)

A report to the Canadian Astronomical Society released in 2000 identified the Very Large Optical Telescope (VLOT) project in conjunction with the TMT as a 'highest priority project'. Such a telescope will be able to see farther and better than ever before and as a result work well with the upcoming space missions such as JWST, Hubble's successor, and Terrestial Planet Finder.

The TMT is designed so that its observations will help to answer questions about how stars, planets and galaxies form, about dark matter and energy and the frequency and types of extrasolar planets. In addition to this look forward to a host of new weird and wonderful discoveries about the universe we live in.

The Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) will be the largest telescope ever built, to be fully operational in 2018. It is being made possible through a private-public partnership that involves groups from both Canada and the United States of America, first formalized in June 2003.

The TMT is an Extremely Large Telescope, or ELT. ELTs are the next step up from the large telescopes of today which are 8-10 m in diameter. It will be made up of over 492 hexagonal mirror segments that span a 30 m diameter. The TMT will operate at both visible and infrared (IR) wavelengths with the use of cutting edge adaptive optics technology.