Ed Moses, the head of the body constructing the $1bn Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), has announced he has left the organization, citing personal reasons. Moses, who was president of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO), has departed after only 10 months in the role “to deal with family matters that require his attention”, according to a GMTO statement. The news of Moses’ departure comes just weeks after Wendy Freedman, chair of the organization’s board, stepped down in early July.
The GMT is scheduled to be fully operational in Chile’s Atacama Desert by 2024, when it will become the world’s largest optical telescope. Moses joined the GMTO as its first president last September, after a stint running the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In June the project received a major boost when the GMT’s 11 international partners committed more than $500m to start construction of the telescope.
Rapid growth
Colleagues of Moses have praised his achievements. “[He] brought his deep experience and has left us stronger,” says Patrick McCarthy, former executive vice president of GMTO, who is now interim president. That view is backed up by Taft Armandroff, director of the McDonald Observatory, who is the new board chair of the GMTO. He pays tribute to Moses’ recruitment programme, with the project office growing from 30 to 90 people in the space of a year. “We now have a strong technical and corporate staff dedicated to GMT,” he says. “Their experience from past projects makes this team ideally suited to establish the GMT as one of the most powerful telescopes in the world.”
‘Comprehensive search’
Freedman became GMTO’s first board chair in 2003, and has now stepped down “to do more science”. Indeed, she joined the University of Chicago last year, and is now principal investigator on a project to measure the Hubble constant to higher accuracy. “The GMTO has been fortunate to have had her guidance for so long,” says Armandroff, who adds that the board will now conduct a “comprehensive search” for a new president.
Meanwhile, construction of the $1.4bn Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea has yet to begin, following protests that have blocked building work. TMT board member Michael Bolte from the University of California, Santa Cruz, says in an official statement that a restart date for construction has yet to be determined. “In the construction timetable, the delay is small, and the time has been well spent in better understanding the concerns about the project,” adds Bolte.
