For Star subscribers: When completed around the start of the next decade, the Giant Magellan Telescope will be the world’s most powerful land-based telescope, though others in development could rival it in size.
Under the east grandstands of Arizona Stadium, University of Arizona scientists have been working for nearly 20 years to make huge mirrors for the world’s most powerful optical telescope.
People are also reading… The UA is not only a founding partner in the GMT — the telescope would not exist if it weren’t for the school’s world-leading expertise, said Robert Shelton, a former UA president who has headed the telescope project as president of the GMTO Corp. since 2017. The UA has won about $100 million in contracts for mirror fabrication and other GMT work, and by the time the project is done it expects to have at least $250 million in contracts, said Buell Jannuzi, director of Steward Observatory and head of the UA’s Department of Astronomy since 2012.
As a project partner, the UA has so far contributed $100.6 million of $142.8 million it has committed to raising for the GMT, which includes a $50 million commitment as part of the partners’ funding round last summer, Jannuzi said. Work on the GMT’s foundation is underway on a steep ridge at an altitude of 8,500 feet on Cerro Las Campanas, where the GMT will join the twin, 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes operated since 2002 by a consortium including the Carnegie Institution for Science, the UA, Harvard, the University of Michigan and MIT. The UA mirror lab made the mirrors for the original Magellan scopes.
At the UA mirror lab in Tucson, scientists have now completed three of the GMT’s seven primary mirrors, using a giant, rotating furnace invented by UA regents professor Roger Angel and colleagues at the UA in the 1980s. Technicians then load 20 tons of pure, borosilicate glass blocks into the lab’s giant furnace for spin-casting at temperatures topping 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. After, the temperature is lowered for a monthlong annealing process
The mirror surface is polished to an optical surface precision of less than one thousandth of the width of a human hair — or five times smaller than a single coronavirus particle. The mirror lab also has made several 6.5-meter mirrors for various projects, recently including a space-based telescope; in all, the Caris Lab has cast 23 mirrors since 1985.
And the UA’s space sciences program, including astronomy, ranks No. 10 overall, No. 6 in the U.S. and No. 2 among public universities in the latest U.S. News & World Report Global Universities rankings. “That review was actually held in two big sessions, in December and in February and then we just recently got the written report and it's very, very favorable," Jannuzi said."The review committee recommended that we move into what's called the construction queue.
Whether the GMT becomes the world's biggest ground-based optical telescope will depend on when it goes into operation relative to other large projects, including the European Southern Observatory's 39.5-meter Extremely Large Telescope, under construction in Chile and projected to see"first light" in 2028.
Meanwhile, the total projected cost of the GMT has grown from $1.5 billion to closer to $2.5 billion, Shelton said, adding that the organization has spent about $500 million so far.
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