‘The door is open’: Iranian astronomers seek collaborations for their new, world-class telescope

The 4-meter Iranian National Observatory, which faced long odds, released its first images today

In a major milestone for Iran’s scientific community, astronomers announced today in Tehran that the Iranian National Observatory (INO) has seen “first light”: The world-class, 3.4-meter optical telescope, whose future appeared cloudy just last year, is operational and has acquired its debut images.

“We’ve been waiting for this moment for so long,” says INO Project Director Habib Khosroshahi, an astronomer at the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM) in Tehran.

First light for the $25 million observatory “comes at a turbulent time,” Khosroshahi acknowledges. Iran has been roiled by protests since last month’s death in police custody of a young woman who’d been arrested for not wearing her hijab properly. “We’re anxious about how our announcement will be interpreted,” Khosroshahi says. “But we want to emphasize that INO is for all the people of Iran. We couldn’t keep this news to ourselves anymore.”  

INO’s scientific odyssey began 2 decades ago—and faced long odds. “When they started this project, it was just a dream. No one in Iran had attempted anything on this scale before,” says Gerry Gilmore, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and chair of INO’s international advisory board.

Last year, some former INO personnel voiced concerns about whether changes to INO’s design might compromise its performance. “Those doubts have been put to rest,” says optical engineer Lorenzo Zago, a consultant and advisory board member. INO opened its dome for sky calibration on 27 September and the next night imaged Arp 282, a pair of galaxies some 319 million light-years from Earth. The image’s resolution—0.8 arc seconds—and that of a second image taken a few days ago, 0.65 arc seconds, are close to the limit set by the atmospheric conditions at INO’s site, 3600-meter Mount Gargash in central Iran. “That resolution’s spectacular. Much better than expected,” Gilmore says.

“The science run, which hopefully starts next summer, will show the quality of the design and construction,” says Reza Mansouri, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Sharif University of Technology who led the project until 2016 and who last year expressed worries about the telescope’s future.

Engineers still need to complete tasks such as integrating software, fine-tuning the active optics, and installing the first science instrument, a high-quality imaging camera. Initial science goals include probing galaxy formation evolution and stellar evolution, and hunting for exoplanets.

The Iranian observatory and two others in the region—a 4-meter infrared telescope in Turkey nearing completion and a 3.6-meter optical telescope in India—fill a geographic gap in a global network that keys in on fleeting phenomena such as gamma ray bursts to try to pinpoint their locations and unravel their physics. “You need a chain of telescopes all around the world to follow up,” Gilmore says.

In building INO, astronomers in Iran had to surmount hurdles that few colleagues elsewhere face: sanctions that curtail high-tech imports, and visa restrictions limiting their travel abroad. The Iranian team purchased the glass mirror blanks from a German firm. INO engineers then had to figure out how to construct nearly everything else on their own. “What surprises me is that the know-how came so fast,” Zago says. “They’ve been working like hell!”

“At every stage they increased the project’s ambition and complexity,” Gilmore says. For example, he says, when so-called active control systems—sensors, actuators, and software that position a primary mirror—first became available for larger telescopes about a decade ago, INO engineers incorporated those into the design. What’s “truly astonishing,” Zago says, is a precision vacuum chamber that INO engineers and an Iranian company fashioned to coat the blanks with aluminum, transforming the polished glass into telescope mirrors. When the United Kingdom in the 2000s set out to build an aluminizing system for its Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, Gilmore says, “it took us forever to get right.”

Khosroshahi hopes to forge partnerships with international teams that might install state-of-the-art instrumentation in INO’s four instrument slots. “The door is open from our side,” he says, though sanctions and politics could stymie some potential collaborations. In the meantime, Iran’s burgeoning astronomy community—just a couple of dozen strong at the project’s outset but several hundred scientists and students today, Khosroshahi says—is looking forward to some serious stargazing. “We fought with disappointment, darkness, and also with words that could discourage us,” says IPM’s Maryam Torki. “But in the end, we witnessed this glorious birth.”

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