tmt never built la palma iac director

TMT will never be built, says Canary Islands astrophysics chief

Compiled with the help of artificial intelligence, based on Spanish-language information. Source below the article.

IAC director doubts Thirty Metre Telescope will ever be built

The director of the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute (IAC), Valentín Martínez Pillet, believes the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) will never be built anywhere in the world, after the international consortium definitively ruled out installing it on La Palma and decided to focus its efforts on Hawaii. “I shouldn’t really say this, but I believe the TMT is not going to be built,” Martínez Pillet said on Thursday during a briefing at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, held to mark the launch of four new Large-Sized Telescopes (LST).

Setback for La Palma as consortium opts for Hawaii

Despite this setback for the island, the IAC director insisted the institution will continue working to attract other large-scale scientific projects to La Palma, with an economic dimension and international impact comparable to those the Thirty Metre Telescope would have brought. The TMT international consortium announced in September that its partners had failed to reach the necessary consensus to accept the Spanish offer to install the telescope on La Palma. The proposal, which envisaged mobilising up to 1 billion euros, had been presented as a solid alternative for hosting this scientific infrastructure in the archipelago. After discarding the La Palma bid, the consortium announced it would concentrate its efforts on Hawaii, its preferred site.

Observatory will keep bidding for major scientific projects

The decision rules out the possibility of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory hosting the project under the terms envisaged until now. Martínez Pillet said there is no longer any possibility of hosting the TMT on La Palma “as we knew it”, although he left the door open to other large-scale scientific initiatives emerging in the future. In this regard, he reiterated that the IAC will work to attract infrastructure capable of generating a similar astronomical, scientific and economic impact on the island. The institute’s director also recalled that the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory receives around ten proposals every year to install new telescopes. However, he stressed that the space available at the complex is limited and that only projects whose scientific value justifies occupying land at these facilities are accepted.

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