Claim that 30-m class telescopes will have resolution far superior to Hubble: true?

This article makes the claim that the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT, number 4 in the list) will have resolution 10 times better than that of Hubble, while the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT, number 3 in the list) will have resolution 12 times better than that of Hubble. These are claims I find impossible to believe.

A simple application of, for instance, the Raleigh Criterion ($theta = 1.22~lambda/D$), where $theta$ is the angular resolution of the telescope, $lambda$ is the wavelength of the light in question, and $D$ is the diameter of the telescope, would show that a comparison between angular resolutions is as simple as comparing the diameters of the telescope apertures. Hubble's mirror is 2.4 m; comparing with the 24.5 m GMT and the 30 m TMT we see that the GMT will have 10.2 times the angular resolution of Hubble, while the TMT will have 12.5 times the angular resolution of Hubble. I think a calculation similar to the one I have described is how the article linked above came up with the numbers they did about the angular resolution of these telescopes compared to Hubble.

However, the Raleigh criterion only applies to telescopes working at their diffraction limit. Space telescopes (if they're designed well and built correctly) can work close to the diffraction limit (maybe even at the diffraction limit). Ground-based telescopes, however, are limited in angular resolution by the atmosphere, which at best will limit resolution to about an arc-second at the best sites on Earth. Thus the GMT and TMT by themselves will not have better image resolution than Hubble.

My question, then, is whether this article is correct (possibly because of one of the reasons I list below) or whether it seems this article naively applied the Raleigh Criterion for angular resolution with no thought about how the atmosphere will affect the resolving capabilities of these large ground-based telescopes.

Possible reasons the article may still be correct:

• Adaptive optics, a developing technology which can allow telescopes to correct for distortions to the image produced by the atmosphere. Perhaps GMT and TMT will have very fancy adaptive optics systems.


• Another technique, such as speckle imaging or lucky imaging.


• Article could be referring to spectral resolution, rather than angular resolution (or image resolution). However, obtaining good spectral resolution is as much the job of the spectral instrument as it is of the telescope so I don't consider "spectral resolution" to be an inherent property of a telescope.