Public and private sectors of US ground-based astronomy have teamed up to design a 30-meter optical-infrared telescope. The alliance was formed to bolster the chances of realizing the project, but it could also herald a thawing of relations between the traditional rivals.
On 11 June, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and the California Extremely Large Telescope (CELT) Development Corp, a partnership of Caltech and the University of California (UC), agreed to raise a total of $70 million for a detailed design of a 30-meter telescope (TMT; the private partners call their preexisting project CELT, and the public partners call theirs the Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope, or GSMT). AURA oversees public, or federally funded, optical observatories, and the CELT group is private, with funding from state and private sources. Canada and the CELT group initiated a similar bilateral agreement on the same day. The grand plan is to...
