Giant Magellan Telescope Poised to Enter Construction Phase

[rdean]

When completed in about 2020 in the Chilean Andes, GMT’s mirrors will have more than six times the collecting area of today’s largest telescopes and 10 times the resolution of Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists will use GMT to explore distant and potentially habitable planets around other stars, to explore the universe in the first billion years after the big bang, and to probe the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and massive black holes.

Giant Magellan Telescope Poised to Enter Construction Phase

We'll be able to see the universe billions of years before even our sun was created. Amazing. I hope I'm still alive to see this wonder.

 

[Moonglow]

My youngest has dreams and aspirations to being an astronomer and/or an astronaut..I got him a telescope for christmas.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

When completed in about 2020 in the Chilean Andes, GMT’s mirrors will have more than six times the collecting area of today’s largest telescopes and 10 times the resolution of Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists will use GMT to explore distant and potentially habitable planets around other stars, to explore the universe in the first billion years after the big bang, and to probe the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and massive black holes.

Giant Magellan Telescope Poised to Enter Construction Phase

We'll be able to see the universe billions of years before even our sun was created. Amazing. I hope I'm still alive to see this wonder.

Im hoping to see a Supernova, and not a little poof either but something like the Crab Nebula

 

[Delta4Embassy]

When completed in about 2020 in the Chilean Andes, GMT’s mirrors will have more than six times the collecting area of today’s largest telescopes and 10 times the resolution of Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists will use GMT to explore distant and potentially habitable planets around other stars, to explore the universe in the first billion years after the big bang, and to probe the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and massive black holes.

Giant Magellan Telescope Poised to Enter Construction Phase

We'll be able to see the universe billions of years before even our sun was created. Amazing. I hope I'm still alive to see this wonder.

And their first images will be this:

 

[Old Rocks]

The most wonderful thing about this kind of scientfic exploration is that we find things that we never imagined. Nobody even guessed the variety we would see in our solar system prior to the first space vehicles sending back pictures.

 

[Victory67]

Very exciting.

 

[whitehall]

My youngest has dreams and aspirations to being an astronomer and/or an astronaut..I got him a telescope for christmas.

Astronomy ain't about looking through a tube with glass lenses. Astronomy is the study of mathematics and sadly the union based education system doesn't prepare American kids for the challenge.

 

[TheOldSchool]

My youngest has dreams and aspirations to being an astronomer and/or an astronaut..I got him a telescope for christmas.

Astronomy ain't about looking through a tube with glass lenses. Astronomy is the study of mathematics and sadly the union based education system doesn't prepare American kids for the challenge.

There's always a party pooper

 

[Political Junky]

60 Minutes covered this tonight.

 

[SmedlyButler]

What really blows my mind are the adaptive optics subsystems. To overcome the blurring of objects by the atmosphere the AO subsystems employ a "pliable" mirror whose shape is altered thousands of times each second.
Computers use data from a laser generated artificial star to drive 336 actuators on the back of the mirror that allows, as the OP said, resolutions 10X greater than the Hubble telescope. Great technology that reduces the need to some extent for expensive Space-based telescopes.

Artist's rendering of the GMT atop it's mountain in Chile.

 

[SmedlyButler]

My youngest has dreams and aspirations to being an astronomer and/or an astronaut..I got him a telescope for christmas.

Astronomy ain't about looking through a tube with glass lenses. Astronomy is the study of mathematics and sadly the union based education system doesn't prepare American kids for the challenge.

Where do you think astrophysicists or theoretical cosmologists get the data they use? How far along would they be shut in a room without real world observations? How would Hubble have discerned the expansion of the Universe? Really, give it a rest.

 

[rdean]

My youngest has dreams and aspirations to being an astronomer and/or an astronaut..I got him a telescope for christmas.

Astronomy ain't about looking through a tube with glass lenses. Astronomy is the study of mathematics and sadly the union based education system doesn't prepare American kids for the challenge.

"Ain't"? Union based education? The kind parents from other countries spend their hard earned money to send their kids here to attend?

Definition of ASTRONOMY

the study of objects and matter outside the earth's atmosphere and of their physical and chemical properties

astronomy noun
Science dealing with the origin, evolution, composition, distance, and motion of all bodies and scattered matter in the universe. The most ancient of the sciences, it has existed since the dawn of recorded civilization.

Astronomy - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

 

[waltky]

Big ol' 1200 ton telescope to see 8,000 years into the past...

Scientists Expect ‘Unexpected’ from Largest Ground-based Telescope
May 07, 2016 - The mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope that gave the world stunning pictures of deep space is about 4.5 square meters.

Compare that with the primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be 25 square meters — and which is creating big expectations for even higher-quality results when it is deployed in 2018. But both will be dwarfed by the Giant Magellan Telescope, which is under construction in Chile's Atacama Desert. Its mirror array covers about 368 square meters. By looking at different parts of the visible and infrared spectrums, the two new telescopes will complement each other, Magellan Telescope director Patrick McCarthy said.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago.​

'Complete picture'

"The two working together, I think, will give us a complete picture, whether we are looking at planets around nearby stars, black holes in the centers of other galaxies, or back to that early universe that we call the First Light, when we see the first stars in the first galaxies," McCarthy said. o isolate it from vibrations, the 1,200-ton telescope will rest on an oil flotation bearing system, completely free of any friction. A range of cameras and spectrographs will record and dissect the received light, looking for signatures of atoms and molecules. And the light coming from billions of kilometers away may be impossibly faint. "The photons come in once every 15 to 20 minutes, so it takes a long time to collect that light,” McCarthy said. “In our case, we think we'll get a few photons a minute, but you need hundreds to get a good signal, so it just takes patience."

What to expect

But with a telescope sensitive enough to detect a birthday candle on the moon, nobody knows what to expect. "The most important is the unexpected,” McCarthy said. “The new discoveries, the unanticipated breakthroughs. That's always been the story of astronomy. When you build a new capability, young people find things that either no one expected, or they prove that their elders were wrong." The $1 billion joint project of the U.S., Australia, Brazil, South Korea and Chile is expected to open for the first observations by 2022 and be fully operational by 2026.

Scientists Expect ‘Unexpected’ from Largest Ground-based Telescope

See also:

No More Space Race for US, Rivalry Gives Way to Collaboration
May 06, 2016 - While many Americans celebrate May 5 as Cinco de Mayo, the anniversary of a Mexican military victory, science nerds recognize the date as a technological milestone: the day the United States first put a man into space.

In 1961, the year astronaut Alan Shepard Jr. made his milestone 15-minute flight, hysteria about the U.S.- Soviet Union space race was in full swing. Russia had already put a man in orbit and had launched the world's first artificial satellite, the Sputnik 1, in 1957, igniting fears that the United States was losing its status as the dominant world power. The United States quickly assembled scientific teams that had been working on space travel; the race to achieve the first manned spaceflight was on. The new U.S. space agency was named the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, and the manned spaceflight program was named the Mercury Project, after the Roman god of swift travel and transit between worlds.

First forays into space

Shepard, a U.S. Navy commander who had experience with aircraft test flights, was selected to pilot the first manned Mercury spacecraft. He wrote later that when he informed his wife he had been selected to become the first American to travel to space, she quipped: "Who let a Russian in here?" But her presumption was right. Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin beat Shepard into space by one month, manning the Vostok 1 as it made one orbit around the earth April 12, 1961.

Expedition 47 Commander Tim Kopra of NASA captured this brightly lit night image of the city of Chicago on April 5, 2016, from the International Space Station​

Shepard made his own historic journey three weeks later, in a less spectacular journey that went only 187 kilometers above the Earth and lasted only 15 minutes. But it was seen as an important milestone as the United States strove to catch up to its Cold War rival in technological innovation. The competition continued throughout the 1960s, finally culminating with the U.S. moon landing on July 20, 1969. Shepard made his own journey to the moon on the third Apollo mission in 1971. Despite being one of the best known names in U.S. space travel, Shepard flew only two missions.

Cooperation on the new frontier

In the four decades between Shepard's last spaceflight, much has changed between the United States and its onetime rival in space. With the 1998 launch of the International Space Station, pushing further into space has become a collaborative effort, including not just the United States and Russia, but also the European Union, China, and Japan. Over the years, at least 222 spaceflight technicians from 18 countries have worked together on long-term projects as they orbit the Earth every 90 minutes.

MORE

Related:

SpaceX Successfully Lands Rocket
May 06, 2016 - SpaceX has once again successfully landed a booster rocket on an ocean platform. The feat was accomplished after the rocket deployed a Japanese communication satellite into orbit.

The unmanned Falcon 9 rocket landed early Friday on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean off the southeastern U.S. coast of Florida.

This image posted to Twitter by SpaceX shows an unmanned Falcon 9 rocket that landed May 6, 2016 on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean.​

Last month, internet entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully landed a used booster rocket after it launched a unmanned cargo ship to the International Space Station.

SpaceX is striving to perfect the technique of landing the booster rockets, making them as reusable as aircraft rather than dumping the expensive equipment into the ocean after each launch.

SpaceX Successfully Lands Rocket