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It’s been almost five years since Gizmodo first reported on the Thirty Meter Telescope, a mega-telescope with a resolution ten times that of the Hubble. Now, it seems the long-delayed project’s time has come: Hawaii has agreed to lease a parcel of land for the telescope, and officials say construction could begin as soon as April.

The TMT dates back to the 1990s, when the idea was first broached by a group of California scientists. In the years since, their idea has taken on the details of a real plan: An almost 100-foot-wide mirror made up of just less than 500 segments, ensconced on a astronomy park atop a dormant volcano called Mauna Kea, where it will do everything from detect light from the earliest stars to search out evidence of dark matter.’ (Gizmodo).