Texas universities help build ‘giant' telescope as it enters final design phase

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AUSTIN (KXAN) — One of the largest telescopes ever built is one step closer to completion. On June 12, the National Science Foundation announced that the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is entering the final design phase.
The announcement brings the decades long project one step closer to federal funding. The telescope will help scientists in Texas and around the world study things like dark matter using the largest Gregorian telescope ever built.
'What it means is they're allowing us to come up with the final details of the design and the final cost estimate, and it's an essential step to getting the federal funding for the telescope,' said Taft Armandroff, director of the McDonald Observatory.
The telescope in Chile is expected to operate by the 2030s and is estimated to cost about $2 billion.
'It's a public private partnership. It'll be about half privately funded and half funded by the federal government,' Armandroff said.
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The telescope will have seven of the world's largest mirrors, capable of collection 368 square meters of light. Each mirror will be 27 and a half feet in diameter.
'The light from these stars and galaxies that are very far away are just so faint. You can think of it as the photons from these stars, the light rays are kind of like rain that's falling down on Earth, and we just need a bigger bucket to collect it,' Armandroff said.
As a Gregorian telescope, the device uses concave mirrors to collect light, before bringing that light to a focus on a secondary mirror, which then reflects that light to the observer.
GMT will be 10 times stronger than the Hubble Space Telescope and four times more powerful than the James Webb Space Telescope.
Parts for the telescope are already under construction across 36 states. Casting of the mirrors began in 2005. Some pieces are being assembled in Texas, including in Austin.
'We're building one of the scientific instruments, a spectrograph called GMTNIRS,' Armandroff said.
The GMTNIRS, or GMT Near-Infrared Spectrograph, will help the telescope observe the near-infrared spectrum of light.
The project is ran by the GMTO Corporation, an international consortium run by research institutions including the University of Texas and Texas A&M University.
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'Our students and faculty and researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, and also at Texas A&M University will use it and with the miracle of computers and the internet, they'll be able to operate it from here in Texas,' Armandroff said.
The GMT will be one of several telescopes in Chile, including the 'Very Large Telescope' and 'Extremely Large Telescope.' The VLT has operated since 1998. The ELT is under construction and will have the world's largest optical telescope once complete.
The country is chosen for its nearly year round clear night skies and the ability to see the southern hemisphere.
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