Construction on the project was halted three years ago, according to Big Island News. The group conducted its own environmental impact statement in 2010 and attempted to begin construction in 20, but protesters disrupted these efforts. The $2.65 billion telescope is a project of the TMT International Observatory (TIO), a group of scientists from California Institute of Technology, the University of California and government-supported research bodies in Canada, China, India and Japan, according to AP News. “To anyone that continues to try to frame TMT as a science versus culture argument, I would say that this struggle over the future of Mauna Kea is actually about how we manage resources and align our laws and values of Hawaii to connect a past where the state has subjected its Indigenous people to continued mismanagement of it lands with its uncertain future,” writer and activist Hulali Kau explained. Both native and non-native Hawaiians oppose the construction of a telescope on this site both because of its sacred status and as an affirmation of Indigenous Hawaiians’ right to control their own land and resources. Mauna Kea, which is the Earth’s tallest mountain when measured from the sea floor, is the most sacred place in Indigenous Hawaiin cosmology, as Kaitlin Grable wrote for EcoWatch in 2019. “Why don’t people accept our ‘no’ for the answer?” Mauna Kea Hui and Mauna Kea Aina Hou spokesperson Kealoha Pisciotta said, as AP News reported. It is considered one of the best places on Earth for stargazing, but it is also sacred to Indigenous Hawaiians, who oppose the project. National Science Foundation (NSF) said Tuesday it would conduct an environmental impact statement for a controversial telescope.Īstronomers want to build a Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in Hawaii. “I wish they would have recognized that we have already spoken,” said Native Hawaiian activist Kealoha Pisciotta, who opposes the plan.The U.S. ![]() Some Native Hawaiians consider the proposed site for the giant telescope, on the Big Island’s Mauna Kea, to be sacred. “I think if … the Europeans were the only international organization that had this kind of research capacity, that really signals something kind of alarming in the U.S., which has historically had a leadership role in contemporary astronomy.”īut the report also highlights astronomy’s problems with Indigenous people. He said the cancellation of a particle accelerator in Texas in 1993 resulted in the research moving to European facilities like the Large Hadron Collider. “There’s a little bit of a feeling of astronomy going the way of physics,” said Doug Simons, director of the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. government fund several large astronomy projects. astronomy if the National Science Foundation does not invest in projects like the Thirty Meter Telescope, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reported Friday. The Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey warned it could be “disastrous” for U.S. has recommended federal funding of a giant telescope in Hawaii. HILO, Hawaii (AP) - An independent review of the state of astronomy and astrophysics in the U.S.
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