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Other design innovations follow in trickle-down fashion. Because a segmented mirror requires a much lighter support than a conventional one, the Keck telescope will weigh only 158 tons, a third the weight of the Hale instrument. Yet it will be able to perform miracles like taking infrared photographs that are 50 to 100 times sharper than any ever before made on earth. Says Caltech Astronomer Maarten Schmidt, famed for his discovery that quasars are the most distant and energetic objects ever observed: "In all aspects, a big telescope can do things better and faster than a small telescope."
Keck is only one of many telescopic brobdingnagians now in various stages of development around the world. In Tucson, scientists at the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (N.O.A.O.) and the University of Arizona are working on still another novel optics scheme: four 295-in. mirrors placed on a common mount. Each mirror would be 2 ft. thick but largely hollow, shaped like a honeycomb. The four could either be used in tandem, creating the equivalent of a gigantic 590-in. mirror, or separately. Overseas, Japanese astronomers also have their eyes on Mauna Kea; they hope to build a 295-in. telescope on the volcano by the 1990s. The European Southern Observatory, headquartered in Munich, is considering an array of four 315-in. telescopes that could, like the N.O.A.O. instrument, act in concert.
Through Keck, the space telescope and other new devices, astronomers hope to get a closer look at a myriad of cosmic quandaries: quasars; pulsars, the spinning neutron stars that transmit precisely spaced radio pulses; and the dusty smudges around some stars, which could be the beginnings of planetary systems much like the sun's. And because light from space, traveling at 186,000 miles a second, takes time to reach the earth, the deeper into space astronomers can probe, the farther back into the past they can see. Says Schmidt: "By looking farther out in the universe, you are paging back in the history books, as it were, to Time Zero." Once they reach that ineffable edge, the scientists may better understand where the universe came from, and where it is going. Or they may end up more baffled than before. Says Nelson: "Probably the most exciting things we'll discover are the things we haven't thought of yet."