Jerry Nelson, project scientist for Hawai`i's Thirty meter Telescope (TMT), is among the winners of the 2012 Franklin Institute Awards, the venerable scientific organization announced Monday. Nelson was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering.
Nelson’s revolutionary contributions in the development of segmented-mirror telescopes were cited as the basis for the honor. Nelson's work helped revolutionize astronomy by allowing primary mirrors, the “heart of a telescope,” to become much larger. Rather than build huge single mirrors that would warp due to gravity, Nelson thought to assemble the mirror out of small segments.
This breakthrough allowed construction of the 10-meter (33-foot) Keck twin telescopes near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which is also the proposed site for the TMT. The Keck 10-meter primary mirrors are still among the largest in the world. Actuators and a computer program keep all of Keck’s 36 hexagonal mirrors synchronized to act as one giant mirror.
The TMT’s primary mirror will comprise 492 hexagonal segments – a huge increase in size, weight, and complexity which would not be possible without Nelson’s expertise and insight.
“I am very excited about taking the segmented mirror concept to a new level with the Thirty Meter Telescope Project,” said Nelson who is also a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It is a great honor for me to receive the Franklin Institute Award and a great tribute to the many people who have made the Keck Observatory such a resounding success.”
The Franklin Institute began giving the annual awards in 1874 to foster the organization’s mission to inspire an understanding of and passion for science and technology learning. The Institute is named for Benjamin Franklin, an inventor, author, scientist, and statesman who helped craft the foundations of the United States.
Franklin Institute Award laureatest include Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Jacques Cousteau, Marie and Pierre Curie, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Jane Goodall, Orville Wright, Stephen Hawking, and Francis Crick and James Watson. Many awardees have also been recipients of the Nobel Prize.
Nelson and the other winners will travel to Philadelphia in April 2012 for a weeklong series of events and activities aimed at familiarizing students and the community with the laureates' remarkable accomplishments. A grand awards ceremony and dinner culmanate the week.
The much disputed TMT is the next-generation astronomical observatory that is scheduled to begin scientific operations in 2018 on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The TMT project is an international partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy, joined by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Department of Science and Technology of India.
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