Chile Begins Constructions For First-Of-Its-Kind Giant Telescope 10 Times Sharper Than Hubble
Constructions for the $1 billion Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) are officially under way, reports Quartz. The giant telescope, intended “to revolutionize our view and understanding of the universe,” is being built at Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert of Chile, with construction crews breaking ground earlier this week.
First in a whole new class of giant ground-based telescopes, the GMT is slated to begin science operations in 2024 and will be scouring the skies with seven segmented mirrors, each with a diameter of 28 feet (8.4 meters) and weighing at least 30,000 pounds (15 tons).
All in all, the mammoth telescope is expected to weigh more than 3,3 million pounds (1,500 tons). Its seven mirrors, a central one surrounded by six off-axis outer mirror (or segments), will have a combined optical surface 83.5 feet (24.5 meters) wide and a total collecting area of 3,961 square feet (368 square meters).
According to the Business Insider, construction crews began digging the foundation on Tuesday, August 14, and are currently drilling a 23 feet deep (seven meters) hole in the bedrock of the 8,248-foot (2,514 meters) Chilean mountain range that will accommodate this massive project.
“It will be supported by a 1,000-ton steel telescope structure that will be housed inside a rotating enclosure that will measure 22 stories tall and 56 meters wide,” a representative for GMT said in a statement.
A $1 billion telescope that will take pictures 10 times sharper than Hubble's is now officially under construction https://t.co/SdEKe9zFlX
— MySA (@mySA) August 18, 2018
Built by a consortium of universities and science institutions in the U.S., Korea, and Australia, the GMT is “capable of exploring the cosmos with unprecedented clarity and sensitivity” and will be making use of “cutting-edge optics technology” to peer to the edge of the universe and snap infrared pictures of the distant cosmos with 10 times the precision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Its secret: ground-breaking laser-based “adaptive optics” that measure the distortion effect produced by Earth’s atmosphere. This distortion is then corrected with the help of software that makes hundreds of adjustments per second to the telescope’s secondary mirrors, yielding extremely sharp photos of the cosmos.
“The GMT will peer back in time to shortly after the Big Bang, when the first stars, galaxies, and black holes formed,” states the Giant Magellan Telescope.
Its mission is to scope out other solar systems in our galaxy in search for potentially habitable planets and analyze their atmospheres to look for signs of biological processes. At the same time, the GMT aims to investigate how the very first starts in the universe were born, to unravel “the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy,” and “to explore the origins of the chemical elements (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and others) that make up our planet and our bodies,” notes the GMT website.
Work on the telescope itself began in November 2015, the Business Insider reported at the time, with the primary mirror segments being cast as early as 2005.
