Machinery even more powerful than the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) should start operating by the end of this decade.
We are talking about the Giant Magellanic Telescope (GMT), which has just received a new investment of US$ 205 million to accelerate its construction.
The equipment’s main mirror will be 25 m in diameter, consisting of seven 8.4 m segments. It will have a total light-gathering area ten times that of the James Webb, providing four times sharper images.
The size will give the telescope the title of space equipment with the largest mirror ever built in history. In addition, it will be 200 times more powerful than the observatories active today on Earth.
But don’t think that GMT will be a substitute. Unlike the Hubble and Webb Telescopes, it will be installed on the surface of the planet – more specifically, at the Las Campanas Observatory, in the Atacama Desert (Chile).
In fact, it will complement JWST research by studying the physics and chemistry of fainter light sources previously detected by the predecessor.
Six of the seven primary mirror segments of the Giant Magellanic Telescope have already begun to be built and the area in which the machinery will be installed has already been cleared. The financing should give the project a boost.
The Carnegie Institution for Science, the universities of Harvard, Chicago, Texas, all American institutions, as well as the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (Fapesp), in Brazil, contributed with the value.
The contribution of US$ 45 million from Fapesp will allow Brazilian researchers to have time set aside for using the telescope. There is still no forecast for the start of GMT operations, but the researchers hope to get their first images by 2029.