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The University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy (IfA) and the Faulkes Telescope Corporation (FTC) are collaborating to locate a two meter (80 inch) telescope facility at the University's Haleakala Observatories, (HO) on Maui. The telescope will be financed through private funds from the Dill Faulkes Educational Trust of the United Kingdom ( UK). The new observatory will be named the Faulkes Telescope Facility in honor of Dr. Martin "Dill" Faulkes, the founder of the Faulkes Educational Trust. The Faulkes Telescope Facility is the first major undertaking of by the trust.
This telescope will be used for astronomical education and outreach. In the UK, the Faulkes Telescope will be aimed at all levels of student from Primary school (5 years old) up to 18 years old, and also at undergraduate students as a secondary objective. In Hawaii, the telescope use will be initially focused on undergraduate and secondary school students. The students in Hawaii and the UK will use the telescope to conduct research projects under the mentoring of their teachers and professional astronomers. The Faulkes Telescope will be the largest telescope in the world dedicated to education and outreach programs.
The Faulkes Telescope Facility will be owned and operated by the FTC, a new Hawaii nonprofit corporation. The University of Hawaii will participate in this project through the IfA. The construction of the telescope is being managed by the Universiter of Leicester.
The telescope will be built in by Telescope Technologies Ltd in Birkenhead, Merseyside in NW England. Plans call for having the instrument installed and operational on Haleakala in 2002. It will be housed in a state-of-the-art facility of approximately 3,300 square feet, and have an enclosure that opens like a clam shell that is capable of exposing the entire telescope to the night sky. The Faulkes Telescope is the second instrument of this design. Its "twin," the Liverpool Telescope, will become installed at one of Europe's premier observatories in the Canary Islands in the fall of 2001.
The telescope will be sited at HO, along a southern edge of the University's land. It will be located to the NW of the Mees Solar Observatory and across the road from the former Baker-Nunn satellite tracking facility. The new facility will occupy a site of approximately a half acre in area. The telescope and its enclosure will be installed on a concrete base approximately 22.5 meters in diameter. A small support building, about 4 meters square, will be located adjacent to the telescope enclosure.
The Faulkes Telescope represents a new generation of astronomical telescope. It will be operated remotely from control centers in the UK or Hawaii---no operator "on the mountain" will be needed. The telescope's control system will determine if the weather is good enough to observe, point the telescope, take the images requested, and then move to the next observation. The telescope enclosure will automatically adjust one or the other side of its "clam shell" to protect the telescope from buffeting by the wind. At the end of the night, or if the weather deteriorates, the enclosure will be closed and the telescope shut down. Maintenance will be restricted to occasional cleaning and lubrication.
The initial instrument to be installed on the Faulkes telescope is a state of the art electronic camera having 4 million individual picture elements, or pixels. Each image taken by the telescope will cover an area of sky about the half size of the full moon. As the project progresses, funds will be sought to adapt one of the IfA's electronic cameras that is sensitive to infrared radiation for use on the Faulkes telescope. The addition of this infrared camera will allow operation of the telescope during daylight hours.
By directing the telescope's operations remotely over the Internet, students from the UK and Hawaii will be able to access observing data in "real time" from their classrooms or request observations in "robotic mode," much as professional astronomers do in working with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In the UK, the Faulkes Telescope will be operated from the National Space Centre, Leicester, UK. A secondary control center will eventually be established at the Maui Community College. University of Hawaii astronomers and their colleagues in the UK plan to engage students in actual research projects that will be published in the scientific literature. Another goal is to encourage joint projects in which students in Hawaii will collaborate over the Internet with their counterparts in the UK. The project will be sharing educational materials separately targeted to the needs of schools and colleges in Hawaii and the UK. In addition to its direct educational mission, the Faulkes telescope will be used as an outreach tool, providing observations to such users as the Bishop Museum and amateur astronomy groups in Hawaii and the UK.
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