Irvine : UCI Teacher to Design Big Telescope’s Camera

An associate professor at UC Irvine has been hired to design a sophisticated camera for aligning the mirror inside the world’s largest telescope.

Gary Chanan, an associate professor of physics, was awarded a $25,000 contract for the design and will be paid from a $70-million donation made by the Keck Foundation of Los Angeles for construction of the telescope and observatory.

The W.K. Keck Observatory and Ten Meter Telescope, now under construction, will be located on the 14,000-foot peak of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii. It is being built through a joint effort of more than 100 scientists and engineers from the University of California and the California Institute of Technology.

The reflecting telescope is expected to begin operations in 1990. It will have a mirror 10 meters, or about 33 feet, in diameter, give it nearly three times the light-gathering power of the next largest telescope, a six-meter telescope belonging to the Soviet Union.

The mirror will be composed of 36 hexagonal pieces that can be precisely adjusted by 108 motors to a bring images into focus. The adjustment, however, requires the alignment camera Chanan has been hired to design.

Scientists say the power of the telescope and its location above the blurring effects of water vapor should extend significantly astronomy’s reach into the universe. At present, the largest telescopes can discern light from galaxies 10 billion light years away.