Extremely Large Telescopes on the Antarctic plateau

The primary limitation to the performance of any large ground-based telescope is the atmospheric properties of its site, particularly the sky emission and the turbulence structure. There are several sites on the Antarctic plateau (South Pole, Dome C and Dome A) for which the increase in infrared sensitivity relative to a mid-latitude site should be as much as two orders of magnitude. The unique turbulent structure above Dome C indicates that an extremely large telescope equipped with only a natural guide star adaptive optics system should achieve equivalent resolution to a mid-latitude extremely large telescope with a multi-conjugate multi-laser guide star system.