Giant Magellan Telescope to Have Four Times James Webb Resolution

 

The most potent telescope ever created, the Giant Magellan Telescope, has received a new $205 million financial boost that will be used to speed up construction. It will have four times the power of the James Webb Space Telescope once it is complete.

 

The money, which will be used to build the enormous 12-story telescope building that will be housed at the Las Campinas Observatory in Chile's the Atacama Desert, is said to be one of the greatest funding rounds for the telescope since its creation.

 

Once completed, the Giant Magellan Telescope will have four times the spatial resolution and ten times the light-collecting area of the James Webb Space Telescope (10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope).

 

Additionally, it will be 200 times more powerful than any scientific telescope now in use. Although a specific completion date has not been specified, commissioning is anticipated to start in the late 2020s, and this most recent funding infusion will undoubtedly go a long way toward achieving that objective.

 

According to the GMTO, over the past few years, the telescope's construction has made substantial progress.

 

In Tucson, Arizona, six of the seven principal mirror segments were crafted. Final testing is being done on the third primary mirror segment, which has finished its two-year polishing phase. The 40,000-square-foot factory that will be used to create the telescope framework has been built in Rockford, Illinois. The first adaptive secondary mirror for the telescope is now being made in France and Italy, and the location in Chile is prepared for the next phase of construction and foundation pouring, according to the GMTO.

 

"The Giant Magellan Telescope will be among the first of a new series of exceptionally large telescopes to be built thanks to this most recent $205 million fundraising round. The expected date of the first illumination is at the end of the decade.

 

The Giant Magellan Telescope is regarded as the space exploration of the future. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which recently wowed the world with its astounding resolution, will be outclassed by this telescope, which will use seven of the largest mirrors in the world to create the most detailed images of the Universe ever captured. The 25.4-meter primary mirror array is made up of seven mirrors with an 8.4-meter diameter and weighs 18 metric tons. However, the Giant Magellan Telescope will advance things.

 

The 368 square meters of total light collection area will provide images crisp enough to distinguish the torch carved on a dime from over 99 miles (160 kilometers) away. The telescope mount is 65 meters long, 39 meters tall, and 2,100 tons in weight. It can rotate completely in less than three minutes. With the greatest field of view of any telescope, seven adaptive secondary mirrors may reconfigure the two millimeter-thick surfaces 2,000 times per second to compensate for the optical blurring impact of the Earth's atmosphere.

 

In other words, the telescope is poised to be a technological marvel and establish a new standard for space observation.

 

The GMTO claims that the JWST will benefit greatly from the "exceptional angular resolution, paired with novel spectrographs and high contrast cameras" of the GMTO.