Gemini North Telescope — Local services in Hawaii

The National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States, the National Research Council of Canada, CONICYT of Chile, MCTI of Brazil, and MCTIP of Argentina own and operate the Gemini Observatory. The NSF is currently (2017) the majority partner, contributing approximately 70% of the funding needed to operate and maintain both telescopes. The operations and maintenance of the observatory is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), through a cooperative agreement with NSF. NSF acts as the Executive Agency on behalf of the international partners.

The Gemini telescopes house a suite of modern instruments, offer superb performance in the optical and near-infrared, and employ sophisticated adaptive optics technology to compensate for the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere. Gemini is a world-leader in wide-field adaptive optics assisted infrared imaging, and has recently commissioned the Gemini Planet Imager, an instrument that allows researchers to directly image and analyze exoplanets that are a millionth as bright as the host star around which they orbit. Gemini continues to support research in almost all areas of modern astronomy, including the Solar System, exoplanets, star formation and evolution, the structure and dynamics of galaxies, supermassive black holes, distant quasars, and the structure of the Universe on the...

Polina: How can a designer possibly influence /design the future? Is this what you intend to do with your work? Carmen: As designers, we try to prepare our surroundings and ourselves for the future by experimenting and researching the possibilities or solutions for certain problems. By bringing this research to a public space, they can react to the work and a public debate or discussion will evoke around the work. By asking and showing all these ‘what if’ questions, people will start to think about the future they want or do not want. As a designer, you can respond to their requests or show them a whole different way of thinking about the future. With this project, I want to speculate about an alternative way of the preservation of data, to increase the odds of achieving a desirable future, a future where no data...

The Gemini Observatory consists of twin 8.1-meter diameter optical/infrared telescopes located on two of the best observing sites on the planet. From their locations on Maunakea in Hawai‘i and Cerro Pachón in Chile, Gemini Observatory's telescopes can collectively access the entire sky. It is used remotely by hundreds of scientists all over the world who are all working on...