Tomorrow morning, I’ll leave for an important science meeting being held at Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada. The Colossus meeting will bring together about 20 distinguished astronomers, engineers, physicists, and opticians to discuss a proposed 74-meter aperture filled interferometric telescope. This project is known as — you guessed it — Colossus. If funded and built, this telescope would be the largest telescope in the world by far, outstripping the current 10.2-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias and even the planned Thirty Meter Telescope by a huge margin.
The Colossus Telescope will be designed to answer some of the big questions humans have had about the cosmos since time immemorial. First and foremost, are we alone in the universe? The detection of an extraterrestrial civilization would of course have profound effects on us as humans. Colossus will be designed to detect an exoplanet’s thermal flux and reflected optical light, distinguishing those from scattered light and terrestrial thermal background.
Aside from detecting habitable planets, the Colossus Telescope will also map the surfaces of nearby stars, image details of the Milky Way‘s supermassive black hole, monitor objects on the Moon as small as 6.5 feet (2m) in size, and examine small details on man-made objects in low Earth orbit, among many other things.
The project is the brainchild of corporate CEO and astronomy enthusiast Caisey Harlingten, whose is hosting portions of the meeting at his Alberta ranch. From the magazine, Senior Editor Michael Bakich and I are pleased to be joining the group. Scientists in attendance will be an impressive bunch, including, among others:
- Svetlana Berdyugina, director of the Kiepeneuer Institute for Solar Physics
- Steve Griffin, Chief Engineer, Boeing
- Olivier Guyon, University of Arizona
- Jeff Kuhn, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii
- Shoichi Okano, Tokyo University
- Robert Skelton, University of California, San Diego
- Peter Wangsness, Wangsness Optics
- Pete Worden, Director, NASA Ames Research Center
I will arrive in Alberta tomorrow afternoon and will keep you updated on this fascinating and important meeting over the next few days.