An 82-foot Magellan telescope has passed all the tests and been approved for construction in hope that it will be operational by 2020.
Features:
- Utilizes a light-collecting mirror surface more than six times the area of current instruments
- Ability to search never-before-explored areas of space, as far back to a billion years after the Big Bang
- Can explore black holes, dark matter, and dark energy
- Adaptive optics system which will flex secondary mirrors to compensate for atmospheric turbulence that generally distorts starlight
Incredibly, Magellan will have 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope!
Unfortunately, we probably won’t be able to track the construction process of Magellan because it is set to be built in Chile, atop a remote Andean mountain.
The fabrication of Magellan’s primary mirrors is already underway at a lab in Arizona, as the process of leveling the mountaintop in Chile draws to a close.
