Overview:

The Greenland Telescope (GT) project has delivered major components of its 12m telescope to the North West corner of Greenland, 1200km inside the Arctic Circle! During the summer of 2016, the Thule Air Base resupply ship delivered 14-40’ shipping containers and six oversized loads, representing 120 tons of telescope base structure and reflector dish components plus support equipment. The team worked through the fall, in freezing temperatures, to complete re-assembly of the azimuth and elevation structure and the reflector dish structure. Preparations are underway to return in April 2017 for completion of the telescope and operation beginning in January of 2018. The telescope will operate for 1-2 years before disassembly and transfer by sled to the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, 1100 km inland and at an elevation of 3200m.

A primary objective of the Greenland Telescope project is to provide the astrophysics community with a tool which enables observations of the area immediately surrounding a black hole with angular resolution comparable to its event horizon. This telescope, when operated as part of a VLBI system which will include ALMA in Chile and the SMA in Hawaii, will have the potential to achieve an angular resolution of a few micro-arcseconds. The targets of opportunity are two supermassive black holes (SMBH) with apparent sizes large enough to resolve with VLBI at submillimeter wavelengths: SgrA* at the Galactic Center, and the nucleus of M87.

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