Edward Moses joins the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) today as its first president, after stepping down as a scientific manager at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Moses had spent the past 15 years overseeing the effort to develop laser-based fusion at Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), but will now focus on managing the construction of the massive 25.4 m optical telescope on northern Chile’s Las Campanas Peak.
When it comes online about a decade from now, the $880m GMT will have almost 10 times as much light-gathering capacity as any existing instrument. Astronomers will use the telescope for everything from spotting exoplanets and examining the formation of stars and galaxies shortly after the Big Bang to measuring the masses of black holes and exploring dark matter and dark energy. Moses’ appointment comes as the project moves from design to construction, with the first of the instrument’s seven primary 8.4 m mirrors having been completed, and two others being ground and polished. Workers have also cleared more than 40,000 m3 of rock from the Chilean site to make way for construction.
Eye on the sky
Moses takes up his new position 16 months after he left the directorship of NIF to concentrate on Livermore’s photon science directorate. At the time, critics accused him of mismanaging NIF and speculated that he had paid the price for NIF’s failure to hit its target of achieving a self-sustaining fusion reaction by 2012. But those murmurings have seemingly not affected his ability to land new roles. “We looked into how people related to him as staff and many at NIF came close to worshipping [Moses] and would have followed him off the cliff,” says Rocky Kolb – dean of physical sciences at the University of Chicago – who is a member of the GMTO board that recruited Moses. “There’s simply no substitute for experience with large technical projects and we’re convinced that he’s the person to get the telescope into operation.”
Moses intends to draw on his 30-year experience in big-science facilities and other ground-breaking projects, which included having to develop new systems and technologies at NIF that did not exist before the facility started. “To manage that, do the R&D, and integrate it together was the big issue,” says Moses, who promises to take the GMT “from a giant telescope to a great laboratory”. GMTO director Patrick McCarthy adds that Moses brings “an order of magnitude attitude, skill and vision” to the project. “We think this is a transformative moment,” he says.
