TMT Webinars and International Science Development Teams

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project is starting a webinar series to provide information about the observatory to the scientific community and will soon open a new call for membership of TMT’s International Science Development Teams (ISDTs). 

The topic for the first webinar is The Thirty Meter Telescope: Project Updates and a Call for ISDT Membership. This webinar will feature presentations about the project status, including updates about the TMT site, and a presentation from the TMT Science Advisory Committee (SAC) about the upcoming call for ISDT membership.

The TMT ISDTs are groups of researchers who work together to provide scientific input and feedback to the TMT SAC and the TMT project, stimulate planning for future TMT observing programs, and foster scientific collaboration across the TMT partnership and beyond. There are currently nine ISDTs spanning topical areas from our Solar System to cosmology.

This webinar will be held twice to accommodate the different time zones of the TMT international partner communities. The ‘North America friendly’ (NA) webinar will be held on Wednesday 18 January 2023 at 14:00 Pacific / 17:00 Eastern Time. Another session timed for TMT’s Asian partner communities will be held on Tuesday 20 December at 10:30 India / 13:00 China / 14:00 Japan (NA date/time: Monday 19 December at 21:00 Pacific). The content will be the same at both webinars, and anyone is welcome to attend either or both. The total webinar duration will be 1.5 hours including time for questions and answers.

To join the webinar, please visit the registration site. The webinar will also be recorded for those who cannot attend in real time. 

The webinar panelists will include the following:

• Robert Kirshner (Executive Director, TMT International Observatory)
• Fengchuan Liu (TMT Project Manager)
• Christophe Dumas (host, TMT Observatory Scientist)
• Masayuki Akiyama (co-host, SAC, Tohoku University)
• Tommaso Treu (SAC, UCLA)
• Yuko Kakazu (TMT Education and Outreach Scientist)
• Leinani Lozi (TMT Hawai‘i Community Outreach Specialist)

The TMT SAC expects to organize more webinars in early 2023 to introduce the TMT science capabilities and initiate discussion in the ISDTs for a planned update of the TMT Detailed Science Case document. 

The Thirty Meter Telescope and the Giant Magellan Telescope are partners with NOIRLab in the US Extremely Large Telescope Program, a joint endeavor to secure US national open access to a substantial share of the observing time on a unique, bi-hemispheric system of next-generation 25–30m telescopes. NOIRLab proposes to provide an extensive suite of user services to support the entire lifecycle of research using Giant Magellan Telescope, TMT and the data they produce.