Gigantic telescope gets green light for construction

Having successfully passed all of its design reviews, the 82-foot Magellan telescope has been approved for construction.

It is expected to be ready for operation come 2020.

There are plenty of points to be made about the telescope. For one, it’ll use a light-collecting mirror surface more than six times the area of current instruments. This will allow it to hunt planets in far off, never-before-explored areas of space, and allow astronomers to time travel back to a billion years after the Big Bang. It’ll also permit scientists to better explore dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. 

One of the other significant improvements expected with Magellan is resolution, as the telescope’s adaptive optics system will flex secondary mirrors in order to compensate for atmospheric turbulence that typically distorts starlight. All told, Magellan will have ten times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. 

Magellan will be built atop a remote Andean mountain in Chile. In anticipation of the design’s approval, the land has already been flattened, and technicians have started to fabricate three of the device’s seven primary mirrors at a lab in Arizona.

“I am delighted with the very positive results of the design and the cost reviews,” said Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie Institution for Science observatories and chair of the board overseeing the project, in a statement. “Along with the successful casting of the first three 8.4-meter primary mirrors and the leveling of the mountaintop in Chile, each step brings us closer to construction.”

Story via carnegiescience.edu