The Lenghu observatory in China’s Qinghai province may soon be getting a big addition. PHOTO: CHEN JIE/XINHUA NEWS AGENCY VIA REDUX
Dear Commons Communiyt,
High on a Tibetan Plateau, China appears to be laying the groundwork for what will be the largest optical telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. But to the puzzlement of some astronomers, China has been keeping a tight lid on plans for its 14.5-meter Large Optical Telescope (LOT), with only glancing references in a handful of abstracts and Chinese media reports. As reported this morning in Science.
“As far as I can tell, it’s real. And it will certainly put China in the big leagues,” says Robert Kirshner, a cosmologist at Harvard University and executive director of the Thirty Meter Telescope, one of two massive U.S.-led optical telescopes undergoing design review and at least a decade away from first light.
The National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) is racing to have the LOT up and running as early as 2030, according to a Chinese astronomer who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about the project. It will be the crown jewel of NAOC’s newest astronomical aerie: Saishiteng Mountain, a 4500-meter peak east of the town of Lenghu in Qinghai province that hosts other cutting-edge telescopes.
In November 2024, NAOC announced a $22 million contract to build the LOT’s dome. But NAOC and the lead institute on the LOT, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology, have not released details, for example, on the design of the mirror, other than that it will observe at both optical and infrared wavelengths.
Purchase orders on NAOC’s website suggest the LOT will have a variety of instruments that would allow it to tackle a range of targets, much like the twin 10-meter W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes in Hawaii. With its larger aperture, LOT’s discovery potential—its light-gathering power and spatial resolution—would be about four times that of the Keck telescopes, the largest in the United States.
The 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) being built by the European Southern Observatory in Chile’s Atacama desert will eclipse the LOT in size. Originally slated for completion in 2018, the $1.5 billion ELT is now expected to see first light in March 2029, with scientific observations—which could include studies of Earth-like worlds around other stars—to commence at the end of 2030.
Still, Kirshner calls the LOT “a wake-up call for American science.” With plans for giant telescopes moving slowly, he fears U.S. leadership in ground-based optical astronomy is slipping away. “I don’t mean to scare people, but we really need to get moving,” he says.
Tony
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