“It’s an industry that is congruent with our culture as explorers,” said Malia Martin, a Native Hawaiian who supports the TMT, as she waved a Hawaiian flag outside the convention centre. The conference featured many sessions on Hawaiian culture and astronomy and saw anti- and pro-TMT demonstrations. How the Mauna Kea stand-off plays out could affect astronomical research in other locations and other fields of science around the world, she says.Īstronomers confronted this new reality this month, when thousands of them attended a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu. “Astronomers really have to do more contemplation about where they are in the world, and about the social context and impact of their work.” “Gone are the days of the scientific conceit of being separate from the community,” says Jessica Dempsey, deputy director of the East Asian Observatory, which operates a telescope on Mauna Kea.
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The island chain - one of the world’s best platforms for stargazing - has become a testing ground for the ethics of conducting research in a place full of injustice towards Indigenous peoples. Whatever the outcome, the debate over the TMT is profoundly transforming how astronomy is done in Hawaii. If project officials cannot work out a way to build the telescope in Hawaii, they intend to move it to an alternative - but slightly less scientifically compelling - site in Spain’s Canary Islands. But there are already 13 telescopes atop Mauna Kea, and the kia’i say that adding the TMT would be too much. The planned Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) would transform astronomy by peering into the Universe with sharper vision than nearly any other. They are preventing construction workers from building an enormous telescope near the summit, on land the kia’i regard as sacred. Wong-Wilson is a leader of the Mauna Kea kia’i, a group of Native Hawaiians who have been encamped near the volcano’s base since July. Wrapped in a trench coat to keep out the wind and cold, the educator and activist held a meeting amid camp beds and folding chairs inside a giant tarpaulin-sheltered tent. One morning earlier this month, on the rain-soaked slopes of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, Noe Noe Wong-Wilson was settled in for the long haul.
The summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii already hosts 13 telescopes.
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