Question

The U.S. has plans to build a 30-meter telescope, while the Europeans are thinking about 39-meter telescope. What technological innovation allows astronomers to be thinking about telescopes with that large an aperture?

A.adaptive optics technology allows them to design a huge mirror which hardly weighs anything
B.the mirror in these telescopes will be constructed from many smaller mirrors which will work together
C.they can build much larger lenses for their telescopes with new kinds of plastics
D.they can put telescopes on tall mountains now, which we could not ever do before
E.those big telescopes are just a dream right now; no one can think of a technology for building them.

Answer 1

The innovation enabling the construction of large aperture telescopes like the 30-meter and 39-meter versions is the segmented mirror design, which combines numerous smaller mirrors into a single large mirror and employs adaptive optics to correct for atmospheric disturbances.

Step-by-step explanation:

The technological innovation that allows astronomers to contemplate building telescopes with very large apertures, like the 30-meter telescope planned in the U.S. and the 39-meter European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), is the concept of a segmented mirror design. Instead of using a single large mirror, which is technically impossible to build and transport when it reaches diameters larger than 30 meters, the primary mirror of these enormous telescopes will be composed of multiple smaller hexagonal mirrors. These mirrors are precisely aligned and work in conjunction to act as a single, large mirror. This design follows the precedent set by telescopes like the Keck Observatory, where each segment can be controlled to maintain the precise shape and alignment required for the telescope to function correctly. Coupled with adaptive optics technology, which corrects for atmospheric disturbance in real-time, this allows for extremely high-resolution images and significantly enhances the light-gathering capabilities of the telescope. The plans for these groundbreaking projects indicate that they will massively increase our observational capacity once completed, with construction already underway in places like Northern Chile's Atacama Desert for the ELT and the Mauna Kea in Hawaii for the Thirty-Meter Telescope.