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Protests against the Thirty Meter Telescope planned for Hawaii’s Mauna Kea are ongoing, but demonstrators agreed to allow astronomers working at the existing 12 observatories atop the mountain to return to work. According to Science, state authorities in turn agreed to construct a temporary access road built around the protesters’ camp at the main summit access point. Police will provide protesters a list of all vehicles going up and down the temporary road in advance, to show that they are not working on the TMT.
Astronomers have already returned to work following the four-week shutdown, the longest in the Mauna Kea observatories’ history. David Tholen, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, said in a separate statement that the deal has already been fruitful, in that weekend observations of the near-Earth asteroid 2006 QV89 with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope ruled out any potential future impact threat to the planet for the next century.
