INNOVATION Centennial Collectors Edition January-February 2020

world, which also spurred construction of the city’s SkyTrain rapid transit system and BC Place Stadium. Over the same period, BC engineers from many disciplines and fields—optical, structural, and mechanical, electrical, software— have also been working to keep Canada at the forefront of large telescope design and development.

Most recently, a small contingent of BC engineers has been working on designing the enclosure for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a five-country project that will allow astronomers and astrophysicists to see deeper into space and observe cosmic objects, like pulsars and back holes, with extraordinary sensitivity. Another group is developing an adaptive optics system that will eliminate the blurriness that occurs when starlight hits a telescope’s mirror, allowing the TMT to create images of the cosmos that are 10 times clearer than those created by previous devices, including the Hubble Space Telescope. Still more engineers are exploring in a whole other direction, developing new technologies for radio telescopes— such as the one at the National Research Council’s Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near Penticton—that will detect radio waves from hydrogen clouds billions of light-years away. With that information, scientists will come ever closer to understanding the history of the universe.

The planned Thirty Meter Telescope will be one of the largest telescopes in history, with a resolution 12 times that of Hubble. BC engineers are developing the telescope’s enclosure, and the adaptive optics system that will compensate for atmospheric turbulence. P hoto : TMT I nternational O bservatory

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