Hawaiian Telescope

After years of hearings and litigation, the Supreme Court of Hawaii on Tuesday approved a building permit for a giant telescope on the ancient, contested site of the volcano Mauna Kea.

The Thirty Meter Telescope, as it is known, would be the largest ever contemplated in the Northern Hemisphere. Hawaiian activists have opposed it, saying that decades of telescope-building on Mauna Kea have polluted the mountain. Some of them went so far as to block construction vehicles from the mountain to prevent work on the telescope...

The telescope would be built by an international collaboration called the TMT International Observatory, spearheaded by the University of California and the California Institute of Technology but also including Japan, China, India and Canada at an estimated cost of $2 billion...

The observatory issued a statement on Tuesday from Henry Yang, chairman of its board of governors and chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, thanking the telescope’s supporters. “We remain committed to being good stewards on the mountain and inclusive of the Hawaiian community,” he said.

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/science/hawaii-telescope-mauna-kea.html