The Giant Magellan Telescope, the most potent telescope ever created, employing the largest mirrors in history, has announced that its worldwide consortium has committed funding to accelerate its final construction.
The money will be invested in the creation of the massive 12-story telescope structure at Ingersoll Machine Tools in Illinois, the advancement of the telescope's seven primary mirrors at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona, and the construction of one of the most technologically sophisticated scientific spectrograph instruments in Texas.
According to Dr. Eric Isaacs, president of the Carnegie Institution for Science, “six like-minded Founders of the Giant Magellan Telescope worked together to close the financial gap between the resources we have attracted to build the telescope and what is required to complete it. This investment will bring the telescope closer to first light and provide the world with transformational knowledge of our Universe.”
More than any previous optical telescope before, the Giant Magellan Telescope, which is being built at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, will enable astronomers to see farther into space with more clarity. In addition to being up to 200 times more powerful than current research telescopes, the Giant Magellan Telescope will have 10 times the light-collecting area and 4 times the spatial resolution of the James Webb Space Telescope.
New scientific findings will be aided by the extraordinary angular resolution, cutting-edge spectrographs, and high-contrast cameras that will be used in conjunction with JWST. The next stage in understanding the physics and chemistry of the smallest light sources in space that JWST will discover will be down to the Giant Magellan Telescope.
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