Native Hawaiian protests have led to a second pause in construction of the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). The extension of the moratorium on construction was announced by Hawaii Governor David Ige on Friday, April 17. The moratorium was called after law enforcement arrested protesters attempting to stop the construction on a mountain that they consider sacred.
Scientists like the Mana Kea summit, which is above cloud cover, because it offers some of the best conditions in the world for ground based astronomy.
Native groups, however, believe that their creation story begins on the mountain summit. It has served as a burial site for Native Hawaiian’s ancient ancestors and is a home to their gods.
The group behind the construction of the TMT is bewildered by the reaction. The group believes that they followed all of the appropriate regulations and took native concerns into account when selecting the site.
”We chose a site that has no archaeological shrines, has not been the site of cultural practices, and isn’t visible from holy sites,” Sandra Dawson, TMT’s Hawaii community affairs manager told New Scientist.
The group hoped that seven years of meetings, which included indigenous groups, would have made their intentions clear and resolved the concerns of local communities.
“We now know that that’s not the case. We’re going to work harder to make that happen,” added Dawson.
According to the Washington Post, Governor Ige has said that he has used the time since the moratorium began to learn more about Manua Kea. Ige has said that it might be necessary to decommission and remove older telescopes to better care for the mountain and reduce activity on the summit.
The governors spokeswoman Jodi Leong has said that the governor and his staff will continue to be involved in a variety of discussions with interested parties to “improve stewardship of the mountain.”
Aboriginal groups, who are currently suing to stop the project on environmental grounds, are skeptical about the moratorium and the governors intentions.
“Regardless if they stop construction for one week, it doesn’t matter … [the project is] still illegal, it’s still desecration, and we still oppose it,” Kahookahi Kanuha, an organizer and spokesman for the protesters told AAAS Science Insider.
There is no word on when construction on the telescope will resume, Ige has said that further announcements about construction would come from the Thirty Meter Telescope.
The telescope was given approval by the state Board of Land and Natural Resources in April 2013.[10]
The TMT, was originally approved by the Hawaiian state Board of Land and Natural Resources in April of 2013
The telescope is designed for near-ultraviolet to mid-infrared observations. The completed telescope is expected to be the second-largest in the world after the European Extremely Large Telescope and will have, by far, the highest elevation of any telescope.
The TMT website claims that it will eventually be the “most advanced and powerful optical telescope on Earth.”
Funding for the telescope comes from a variety of sources including the governments of China, Japan, India and Canada. To date, the National Science Foundation of the United States has declined to participate in the project. However, the University of California and California Institute of Technology (Caltech) are both partners in the TMT.
