A land-use board in the state of Hawaii says it has given approval of a sublease for a giant telescope destined to be one of the world's largest, but has put the approval on hold to hear from the public and opponents of the plan.
Hawaii's Board of Land and Natural Resources has been considering approval for the plan to construct the $1.3 billion Thirty Meter Telescope at the top of the Big Island's Mauna Kea volcano.
While the approval of the sublease was seen as the last serious bureaucratic obstacle for astronomers promoting the project, it still faces the possibility of lawsuits brought by opponents.
Those opponents have criticized the approval, questioning whether the land appraisals were carried out in the proper manner and whether the concerns of Native Hawaiians had been taken into account.
Mauna Kea, Hawaii's highest peak, is considered sacred by Native Hawaiians, and opponents say construction activities would desecrate the site.
The board said it would put its provisional approval on hold to hear objection to the plan in a separate review process.
The master lease for the Mauna Kea Science Reserve, from which the sublease would be granted, is held by the University of Hawaii.
University lawyers made a presentation to the Board of Land and Natural Resources in which they addressed questions regarding the amount of proposed rent the Thirty Meter Telescope would pay, matters of historic preservation, and the legality of granting a sublease under Hawaiian state law.
The Board of Regents of the university had given its approval of a sublease in February.
The Thirty Meter Telescope is intended as a general-purpose instrument to do research in a wide range of astrophysical pursuits.
The proposed telescope, with a large, segmented mirror 98 feet in diameter, is designed to make celestial observations in wavelengths from mid-infrared to near-ultraviolet.
Distortions and blurriness caused by the Earth's atmosphere would be canceled out by the telescope's adaptive optics system, which can actively control and move the 492 small hexagonal mirrors that together make up the telescope's observing mirror.
From an initial lists of five possible sites for the telescope -- three in Chile, one in Baja California in Mexico, and the Hawaiian Mauna Kea site -- the board of directors of the TMT Observatory Corp. narrowed the choices to one Chilean site and the Hawaiian location, finally settling on the Mauna Kea location in 2009.
The telescope project is a collaboration between scientific entities in the United States, Canada, Japan, China and India, with funding from a number of private and public organizations.
