A telescope with ' Giant ' in its name, got to be something. We are talking about The Giant Magellan Telescope, which is the largest Gregorian optical infrared telescope ever engineered, providing the widest field of view of the Universe with seven of the world’s largest mirrors. The telescope is under construction in Las Campanas Peak at the southern edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert.
While the Hubble Telescope has always introduced us to some amazing pictures from the depths of Space, and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and stepped up the game, The Giant Magellan Telescope when finished and functional will have 10x the light collecting area and 4x the spatial resolution of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and will be up to 200x more powerful than existing research telescopes.
The Giant Magellan Telescope is not competing for likes with JWST, instead, its unprecedented angular resolution, combined with revolutionary spectrographs and high contrast cameras, will work in direct synergy with JWST to empower new scientific discoveries.
The Giant Magellan Telescope will be the next step in studying the physics and chemistry of the faintest light sources in space that JWST will identify. This includes searching the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets for life, studying the first galaxies that formed in the Universe, and finding clues that will unravel the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and the formation of the Universe itself.
The Giant Magellan Telescope is the work of the GMTO Corporation, an international consortium of leading universities and research institutions from the United States, South Korea, Israel, Brazil, and Australia. GMTO Corporation is a nonprofit organization established in 2004 and headquartered in Pasadena, California.
GMTO Corp. recently received a $205 million investment from its international consortium to accelerate construction. This investment marks one of the largest funding rounds for the telescope since its founding and includes leading commitments from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), The University of Texas at Austin, University of Arizona, and the University of Chicago.
“The funding is truly a collaborative effort from our Founders. It will result in the fabrication of the world’s largest mirrors, the giant telescope mount that holds and aligns them, and a science instrument that will allow us to study the chemical evolution of stars and planets like never before.”
- Dr. Robert Shelton, President of Giant Magellan Telescope
The investment will be used to manufacture the giant 12-story telescope structure at Ingersoll Machine Tools in Illinois, continue progress on the telescope’s seven primary mirrors at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab, and build one of the most advanced scientific spectrograph instruments in Texas.
The Giant Magellan Telescope has already achieved significant construction progress over the last few years. Six of seven primary mirror segments have been cast in Tucson, Arizona. The third primary mirror segment has completed its 2-year polishing phase and is undergoing final testing. Construction of a 40,000 square-foot facility in Rockford, Illinois to manufacture the telescope structure is complete. The production of the telescope’s first adaptive secondary mirror is well underway in France and Italy, and the site in Chile is primed for the next stage of construction and pouring of the foundation.
The Giant Magellan Telescope is anticipated to be functional by the end of 2030.
Some fun facts about The Giant Magellan Telescope
Total collecting area of 368 square meters will deliver images sharp enough to resolve the torch engraved on a dime from nearly 160 kilometers away.
25.4-meter primary mirror array consists of seven of the world’s largest mirrors, each 8.4 meters in diameter and weighing 18 metric tons.
Seven adaptive secondary mirrors can reshape their 2-millimeter-thick surface 2000 times per second to correct for the optical blurring effect of Earth’s atmosphere over the widest field of view of any telescope.
Light path only takes 2 or 3 reflections (depending on observation mode) before entering scientific instruments, the most efficient photon usage of all Extremely Large Telescopes.
Gregorian design can accommodate up to ten scientific instruments, more than any other telescope.
The telescope mount is 39-meters-tall, weighs 2,100 tons and is housed in a 65-meter enclosure that can complete a full rotation in nearly 3 minutes.
Median seeing at Las Campanas Peak in Chile is 0.63 arcseconds at 5000 Å, with the best quartile below 0.50 arcseconds — some of the best optical seeing on Earth.