Following protests and a permit revocation, the Thirty Meter Telescope board is considering other places to build the project instead of the top of Mauna Kea, Physics World reported Friday.
“Hawaii is still an option but we are very actively looking at alternatives,” Fiona Harrison, Caltech physicist and member of TMT International Observatory’s governing board, told the publication. “We’ll be culling down [the list of sites] to a few options over the summer.”
Observatories atop Mauna Kea are among the best positioned on the planet to look deeply into the universe. TMT would be the most powerful and highly elevated of any of the big telescopes.
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Nathan Eagle is a deputy editor for Civil Beat. You can reach him by email at neagle@civilbeat.org or follow him on Twitter at @nathaneagle, Facebook here and Instagram here.