Policies should favor astronomy in isles

Where the future of Hawaii astronomy should be bright, it is cloudy. The promising Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, stymied by protest, is inching its way back through the regulatory challenge of a state Board of Land and Natural Resources hearing.

And on Maui, there is the prospect of another state-of-the-art development: The University of Hawaii has proposed installing the world’s highest-contrast optical telescope in place of equipment it is retiring at Maui’s Haleakala High Altitude Observatory.

Much of the protest lodged in recent years has focused on the Mauna Kea issue. But some representatives of the movement, arising from Native Hawaiian cultural concern and environmental issues, have asserted that Haleakala merits its attention, too.

Even if the footprint of the observatory is not enlarging with the project, “the continued presence is a desecration,” said Kahele Dukelow of Kako’o Haleakala, a group organized to oppose the proposed 140-foot-tall Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope. That Maui scope was cleared to proceed by the Hawaii Supreme Court last month.

The more recent project is dubbed PLANETS (Polarized Light from Atmosphere of Nearby Extra-Terrestrial Systems). At a cost of $4 million, it would fit into a structure that formerly housed the University of Chicago Cosmic Ray Neutron Monitor Station on the Haleakala summit.

These facts underlie the UH finding of no significant impact — and they should defuse any opposition as well. The project should get the conservation district use permit it seeks, assuming a careful review uncovers no problems.

In recent decades the Hawaiian and environmental movements have pressed the UH Institute for Astronomy, which oversees the research activities on the mountaintops, toward better stewardship of their sites.

In addition, heightened concern about the fragility and cultural importance of the sites has pushed the state land board to control access to the observatories, especially on Mauna Kea, by tour groups and others.

This more rigorous oversight has earned continued support.

In 2010, the Office of Mauna Kea Management, an agency of UH-Hilo, adopted a decommissioning plan for Mauna Kea observatories that become obsolete.

In the heat of the mountaintop protests more than a year ago, Gov. David Ige sought to strike a balance between those protesting the TMT and those advancing the project by putting some additional teeth in that blueprint. As part of a 10-point action plan, Ige asked UH to decommission “as many telescopes as possible with at least 25 percent of all telescopes gone by the time TMT is ready for operation.”

That’s an aggressive goal, and it’s one that seems to assume TMT goes ahead. Or does it?

As sensible as decommissioning retired equipment is, Ige has not given sufficiently full-throated support to the TMT specifically, or to the astronomy field and its related industry in general. The industry does deserve a clear commitment from the state that its policies and plans will support its continuation.

Hawaii has sought for decades to diversify its economy, increasingly dominated by and dependent on tourism. Technology development has been seen as a desirable focus for development, but the state has struggled to attract and keep new tech companies in the islands.

Astronomy is one of the few technological fields in which Hawaii has a distinct advantage: a clear view of the cosmos, and one that’s accessible within the U.S.

It also offers Hawaii’s youth educational and career opportunities in a field that advances human knowledge and does so with relatively low impact on the environment. PLANETS moves Hawaii closer to those lofty aspirations.