Engineers began blasting a home for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) on a mountaintop in Chile Friday.
Meanwhile, back in Tucson, the second of two giant mirrors being cast for the GMT is still cooling in a furnace beneath Arizona Stadium.
When assembled at the Carnegie Institution’s Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, the GMT will combine light from seven 8.4-meter mirrors to create a telescope with the collecting surface of a mirror 24.5 meters (80-feet) in diameter. (A meter is lightly larger than three feet.)
The blasts Friday were the first of about 70 explosions that will clear 3 million cubic feet of rock from an 8,500-foot peak, leaving a bedrock pad for the GMT.
Completion of the telescope is, optimistically, 10 years away.
People are also reading…
The University of Arizona is one of 10 international partners in the project.
Faculty concerned about changes to U of A admissions policy
