At nearly 14,000 feet, Maunakea is the tallest mountain in Hawaiʻi, and the second tallest on any island on Earth. Clouds often settle below the mountain's barren, dark-brown summit, making the site one of the best for astronomy in the world.
At the summit, one can find several of the world's finest telescopes, including the W. M. Keck Observatory, a partnership between Caltech and the University of California. Situated below Keck's twin telescopes is an area dubbed Submillimeter Valley, where the silver geodesic dome of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory(CSO) has resided since the observatory's inception in 1985, along with two other facilities that observe the cosmos using similar wavelengths of light.
This past summer, astronomers, engineers, and technicians dismantled CSO's telescope, including its 10.4-meter primary mirror, or reflector, which is made of 84 hexagonal aluminum honeycomb panels and weighs 10,000 pounds. They carefully reverse engineered the mirror frame, or truss, separating it into eight pieces and then loaded these and other telescope components into shipping containers that wound down the mountain on trucks.
