A telescope with “Giant” in its name has to be something. We’re talking about the Giant Magellan Telescope, the largest Gregorian optical infrared telescope ever designed, offering the widest field of view in the universe with seven of the largest mirrors in the world. The telescope will be built at Las Campanas Peak on the southern edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert.
While the Hubble Telescope has always brought us some amazing images from deep space and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and stepped up the game, when the giant Magellan Telescope is complete and operational, it will be 10 times that and 4 times the light-gathering surface have spatial resolution of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and will be up to 200 times more powerful than existing research telescopes.
The Giant Magellan Telescope does not compete with JWST for likes, instead its unprecedented angular resolution combined with revolutionary spectrographs and high-contrast cameras will work in direct synergy with JWST to enable 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 scouring the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets for life, studying the first galaxies to form in the universe, and finding clues that unlock the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and the formation of the universe unravel yourself.
The Giant Magellan Telescope is the work of GMTO Corporation, an international consortium of leading universities and research institutes from the United States, South Korea, Israel, Brazil and Australia. GMTO Corporation is a non-profit organization founded in 2004 and headquartered in Pasadena, California.
GMTO Corp. recently received a $205 million investment from its international consortium to accelerate construction. This investment represents one of the largest rounds of funding for the telescope since its inception and includes leading commitments from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago.
“The funding is truly a joint effort by our founders. It will lead to the manufacture of the world’s largest mirrors, the giant telescope mount that holds and aligns them, and a scientific instrument that will allow us to study the chemical evolution of stars and planets like never before.”
– dr Robert Shelton, President of the Giant Magellan Telescope
The investment will be used to manufacture the giant 12-story telescope structure at Ingersoll Machine Tools in Illinois, to continue advances on the telescope’s seven primary mirrors at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab, and to build one of the most advanced scientific spectrograph instruments in Texas.
The Giant Magellan Telescope has already made significant construction progress in recent years. Six out of seven primary mirror segments were 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 telescoping structure has been completed. Production of the telescope’s first adaptive secondary mirror is well underway in France and Italy, and the site in Chile is ready for the next phase of construction and foundation pouring.
The Giant Magellan Telescope is expected to be operational by the end of 2030.
Some fun facts about the giant Magellan telescope
A total collection area of 368 square meters will provide images sharp enough to resolve the flare engraved on a dime from nearly 100 miles away.
The 25.4 meter long primary mirror array consists of seven of the largest mirrors in the world, each measuring 8.4 meters in diameter and weighing 18 tons.
Seven adaptive secondary mirrors can reshape its 2mm-thick surface 2000 times per second to correct the optical blurring effect of the Earth’s atmosphere across the widest field of view of any telescope.
The light path requires only 2 or 3 reflections (depending on observing mode) before entering scientific instruments, the most efficient use of photons of any Extremely Large Telescope.
The Gregorian design can hold up to ten scientific instruments, more than any other telescope.
The telescope mount is 39 meters high, weighs 2,100 tons and is housed in a 65 meter high housing that can complete a full rotation in almost 3 minutes.
The mean seeing at Las Campanas Peak in Chile is 0.63 arcsec at 5000 Å, with the best quartile below 0.50 arcsec – some of the best optical seeing on Earth.