{"id":15144,"date":"2012-06-12T09:14:44","date_gmt":"2012-06-12T07:14:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=15144"},"modified":"2012-06-12T13:46:42","modified_gmt":"2012-06-12T11:46:42","slug":"1-35bn-eye-in-the-sky-a-step-closer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/trending\/15144\/1-35bn-eye-in-the-sky-a-step-closer\/","title":{"rendered":"$1.35bn &#8216;eye in the sky&#8217; a step closer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A plan to build the biggest land-based optical telescope in the world has cleared an important hurdle, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced late Monday (12 June).<\/p>\n<p>Two-thirds of ESO&#8217;s governing council gave full or provisional approval for the so-called European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which opens the way to starting work on the project, it said in a press release.<\/p>\n<p>The 1.083-billion-euro ($1.35-billion) scheme entails building a telescope with a massive light-catching mirror 39.3 metres (127 feet) wide, several times the size of the biggest optical telescopes today.<\/p>\n<p>It will be sited on Cerro Armazones in northern Chile, close to ESO&#8217;s existing Paranal Observatory, where the extremely arid conditions and high altitude offer excellent viewing of the skies.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is an excellent outcome and a great day for ESO. We can now move forward on schedule with this giant project,&#8221; ESO&#8217;s director general, Tim de Zeeuw, was quoted as saying after the council meeting in Garching, Germany.<\/p>\n<p>If all goes well, the E-ELT would start operations about a decade from now, becoming one of the great astronomical assets of the 21st century alongside a planned radio telescope, the <a title=\"Square Kilometre Array (SKA)\" href=\"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/forum\/showthread.php\/1702-SKA-Square-Kilometre-Array\">Square Kilometre Array (SKA)<\/a> set to be built in South Africa and Australia.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The E-ELT will tackle the biggest scientific challenges of our time, and aim for a number of notable firsts, including tracking down Earth-like planets around other stars in the &#8216;habitable zones&#8217; where life could exist &#8211; one of the Holy Grails of modern observational astronomy,&#8221; ESO said.<\/p>\n<p>ESO, which marks its 50th anniversary, is Europe&#8217;s biggest international venture in astronomy.<\/p>\n<p>In Monday&#8217;s vote, six out of 10 countries gave firm approval and four gave &#8220;ad referendum&#8221; approval, meaning that they needed an official green light from their governments.<\/p>\n<p>Four other countries said they supported the scheme and were &#8220;actively working towards joining the programme in the near future,&#8221; ESO said.<\/p>\n<p>Work on building the E-ELT will start once the &#8220;ad referendum&#8221; votes are made official and financial commitments are secured for at least 90% of the total cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A plan to build the biggest land-based optical telescope in the world has cleared an important hurdle, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced late Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":13669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,3103,3105,3104,3106,1540,1539],"class_list":["post-15144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-active","tag-e-elt","tag-eso","tag-european-extremely-large-telescope","tag-european-southern-observatory","tag-ska","tag-square-kilometre-array"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15144"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15197,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15144\/revisions\/15197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}