Post by Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe on Apr 20, 2006 0:24:11 GMT -6
ANU To Help Build World's Most Powerful Telescope
The Australian National University will help build the world's most powerful telescope after signing a Memorandum of Understanding on the weekend to construct the giant telescope with an international consortium of research organisations.
The Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT, is in the preliminary planning stage and is likely to be one of the first of a small number of next generation Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) due to come on-line in the next two decades.
The GMT will detect and study planets around other suns, probe the dark matter and dark energy that controls the expansion and development of the cosmos, and unlock the secrets of star and planet formation.
As part of the GMT consortium, ANU joins an elite group of research and teaching institutions in the US to plan the detailed design of the telescope (see http://www.gmto.org), including the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona, the University of Michigan, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas A&M University.
The telescope's conceptual design anticipates a moving mass of 1000 metric tonnes and a cylindrical enclosing dome towering 65 metres - about 18 storeys - high.
Based on a superb observing site in northern Chile, the telescope is expected to "see first light" in 2015 and come into routine operation one year later. The first mirror of the huge assembly has already been cast in Tucson, Arizona, and is being prepared for polishing. Over the next three years, the GMT Partnership will engage in an intense detailed design phase in which contracts could flow to Australia before building begins in 2010.
The primary mirror of the Giant Magellan Telescope will be composed of six segments, each 8.4 metres in diameter surrounding a seventh central mirror of the same size. The total light gathering power thus will be nearly seven times that of the international Gemini telescopes, the largest telescopes to which Australian astronomers now have access.
More here: www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.nl.html?pid=19620
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I would like an hour at the eyepiece...
