Ex-chief of nuclear energy project to lead major telescope initiative
Ed Moses, who until a year ago led efforts to create a self-sustaining source of thermonuclear energy at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, has taken a new job as head of a project to build the world’s largest ground-based telescope in Chile.
Known as the Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT, the instrument will combine seven huge optical mirrors to yield the observing power and sensitivity of a single adjustable mirror 800 feet in diameter.
Moses, an eminent laser scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1980, took a leave from NIF about a year ago after enduring years of controversy as science teams there repeatedly proved unable to achieve their goal of what in effect would be controlling the energy of a hydrogen bomb to possibly provide a sustainable source of clean power.
The NIF project, which employs some 800 physicists and engineers, has so far cost $5 billion since construction was completed in 2009.
After a management shakeup and new leadership, Moses’ team scored a major success when the physicists reported in February they had fused hydrogen particles under
“Ed has the unique skills, knowledge and experience to lead the design, construction and commissioning” of the Giant Magellan Telescope. Wendy Freedman, astronomer and chairwoman of the project
increasing laser-generated pressures to create tiny implosions that for a fraction of a second yielded more energy than the energy in the hydrogen fuel itself.
The ultimate goal of a sustained fusion reaction — known as “ignition” — is still somewhere in the future, however.
For the past year, Moses had been at UC Berkeley, but recently moved to Pasadena to lead a group of 40 scientists at the Magellan telescope project’s headquarters there.
The team will grow to hundreds of engineers and other workers next year when construction of the telescope begins at the Las Campanas Observatory in the high desert of the Chilean Andes, said DavinMalasarn, a spokesman for the Magellan telescope project.
“Ed has the unique skills, knowledge and experience to lead the design, construction and commissioning of the GMT,” said astronomer Wendy Freedman, chairwoman of the international project that includes more than a dozen American and foreign institutions.
Completion is expected in 2021.
The size of the telescope’s huge mirror, however, will eventually be outshone by an even larger instrument called the Thirty Meter Telescope, another international project that is led by the University of California.
The telescope is still in the design stage — primarily by astronomers at UC Santa Cruz — and no completion date has been set.
It will consist of nearly 500 small mirrors to create a single adjustable mirror nearly 1,00o feet in diameter. Major American astronomy institutions as well as others in Canada, India, Japan and China, are partners in the billion-dollar venture. The telescope will be located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.