Larry Stepp knows telescopes. He has worked on some of the biggest in the world; telescopes that sit on mountains and capture light from stars and galaxies billions of light-years away.

Now Stepp, who was born and raised in Lincoln, is helping design and build a telescope so big that its light-collecting mirror will be about the size of a baseball diamond.

The 30-Meter Telescope Project is an astronomer’s dream.

The telescope will have 10 times the light-collecting area of each of the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii — which rank as the world’s largest — and more than 20 times the collecting area of the James Webb Space Telescope, the planned successor to Hubble.

“It will be able to collect so much light — more light than any other existing telescopes — that we will be able to see very faint objects,” Stepp said while on a recent visit to Lincoln. “We’re hoping to see back to the creation of the universe when the first galaxies were formed.”

What will give the 30-meter telescope its great light-collecting capability is the mirror. Instead of one giant mirror found in traditional telescopes, the 30-meter telescope project will have a segmented mirror made up of 738 hexagons —  all working together like a huge jigsaw puzzle to focus light emitted from stars and galaxies as much as 10 billion light-years away.

Unlike Hubble, the 30-meter telescope will be based on land. No final location has been chosen, but six potential sites are under review, Stepp said. One of the locations is on top of Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in the Pacific and home to a number of large observatories. A site near San Pedro Martir in Baja California, Mexico, also is being considered, along with four sites near the Atacama Desert in northern Chile.

If everything goes according to plan, the 30-meter telescope should start collecting its first light in 2014 and be fully operational a year later. Total cost of the project is estimated at $700 million. By comparison, the Keck telescopes on Mount Mauna Kea in Hawaii cost about $100 million apiece.

“A lot depends on funding,” Stepp said. “We have design funding but no (construction) money.”

The $700 million is only a working estimate. Stepp said the final price tag will be determined after the conceptual design phase is complete and cost estimates are obtained from equipment vendors.

“We can’t say we can build it for that. However, we will know the cost before asking for funding,” Stepp said.

The project’s partners hope the money would come from the National Science Foundation and other public and private  sources in the United States and Canada. World-class telescopes are expensive, and the need for such projects is determined every 10 years by a foundation review committee.

The 30-Meter Telescope Project was conceived in 2000 and financing support for the design phase of the project was approved by the foundation in 2005. Half of the $70 million for the design phase will come from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Canadian Fund for Innovation.

Stepp views segmented-mirror technology as the best way to obtain a large high-resolution mirror that also is lightweight and practical. Furthermore, it can be operated with smaller equipment, which helps reduce costs.

A graduate of Lincoln High School and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Stepp is responsible for the telescope’s structure, optics and controls. That wasn’t his career goal when he earned his master’s degree in engineering mechanics from UNL in 1978. He left Lincoln and moved to Dallas, where he worked for Texas Instruments for seven years. While there, he took a job as an optomechanical engineer in the company’s electro-optics division.

Stepp developed an interest in astronomy at an early age, and as an undergraduate student was president of the local Prairie Astronomy Club before he left for Texas. At  the time, plans were in the works to build Hyde Memorial Observatory in Holmes Lake Park.

Jack Dunn, coordinator of Mueller Planetarium, remembers Stepp well:  “He actually built some effects for me that were used in the planetarium. He was interested in optics back then.”

Stepp said the optomechanical engineer position gave him a chance to do professionally what he had been doing for so many years  as an amateur astronomer.

In 1985, Stepp took a position in Tucson,  Ariz., with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, a division of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, commonly referred to as AURA.

AURA is  a consortium of about 40 universities and educational and other nonprofit institutions that operate world-class astronomical observatories. It is that group that wants to build the 30-meter telescope. Other partners include the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy, California Institute of Technology and the University of California.

While in Tucson, Stepp worked on the 16-meter National New  Technology Telescope Project. “At the time, it was intended to be the largest telescope in the world, but the project never got funded,” he said.

Instead, a decision was made to build two 8-meter telescopes, one on Mount Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the other on Mount Cerro Pachon in Chile. Together, the two telescopes make up the Gemini Observatory, which allows astronomers to explore the universe from the northern and southern hemispheres.

After working on a smaller telescope project on Kitt Peak in Arizona, Stepp joined the Gemini Observatory Project as its optics manager in 1991. He stayed with that 10-year project through its design and construction phase. The  Gemini Observatory was an international effort and was built with the help of the United Kingdom,  Canada, Chile, Argentina and Australia.

As an amateur astronomer and student living in Lincoln, Stepp, who is now 55, said he never thought he would one day be involved in such a prestigious project.

“I guess I never really believed that I could earn a living designing telescopes.” 

Reach Algis J. Laukaitis at 473-7243 or alaukaitis@journalstar.com.