UH plans to take down small telescope from mountain

The University of Hawaii announced plans Tuesday to remove a small educational telescope atop Mauna Kea in response to Gov. David Ige’s call for a 25 percent reduction of the observatories on Hawaii’s tallest mountain by the time the Thirty Meter Telescope is operational in 2024.

The Hoku Kea Telescope — touted only a few years ago as an “educational resource of unprecedented value” to UH-Hilo students and faculty — joins Caltech’s Submillimeter Observatory in the planning stages for dismantling and removal starting in 2016.

Although the problem-plagued UH-Hilo telescope has been inoperable since 2010, the university received $450,000 in state funds to repair the facility, university spokesman Dan Meisenzahl said Tuesday.

But after the governor last month called for the decommissioning of telescopes in the wake of the TMT controversy, the university decided it could afford to let the facility go and use the funds elsewhere, he said.

UH-Hilo will begin dismantling Hoku Kea in early 2016 following the decommissioning process outlined in the Office of Mauna Kea Management’s Comprehensive Management Plan.

That plan, which requires all of the observatories to have the funds and plans ready for eventual decommissioning and site restoration, calls for only 10 observatories in Mauna Kea’s Astronomy Precinct by the end of UH’s current lease in 2033.

There are now 13 telescopes on the mountain.

Hoku Kea’s removal is expected to be completed in 2018 after the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory’s scheduled decommissioning, Meisenzahl said. Once the 900-square-foot site is restored to its natural state, no new observatory will be built there.

Caltech, one of the institutions behind the $1.4 billion TMT project, announced in April that it is ending operations of its Mauna Kea observatory and will also begin the decommissioning process in 2016. As with the UH-Hilo telescope, no new observatory will be built on the site.

Caltech’s 10-meter radio telescope became expendable with the impending construction of a next-generation radio telescope in Chile, according to the institution.

The 18-story TMT — expected to be the most powerful optical telescope in the world and capable of seeing more than 13 billion light-years away — is planned to become operational on Mauna Kea in 2024. It will be operated by TMT International LLC with partners that include universities and astronomy institutions in the United States, India, China, Japan and Canada.

The Hoku Kea Telescope is on the site of the Air Force 24-inch telescope. Built in 1968, the Air Force telescope was the first one on the mountain and was originally operated by the UH-Manoa Institute for Astronomy.

During its heyday the Air Force 24-inch telescope conducted pioneering observations of objects in the solar system, including asteroids and the outer planets. As larger and more powerful telescopes took up residence on Mauna Kea, the small telescope remained relevant, with UH-Hilo faculty and students using it to collect data for more than a dozen published research projects since 1995, according to the university.

The Air Force telescope was removed in 2008, and the facility was outfitted with a larger dome and mirror in 2010 and named the Hoku Kea telescope. It was beset with problems, including the installation of a defective primary mirror and a damaged secondary mirror. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent trying to make the facility operational to no avail.

Meisenzahl said telescope viewing time for Hilo students is being accommodated at other Mauna Kea observatories, including Manoa’s 2.2-meter telescope, the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope.