This Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) has got a nice piece of change to help in the development and testing of advanced technologies that offer a vision as sharp as future observations.
U.S. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has given a grant of Rs. 17.5 million to the GMTO Corporation, which is developing the GMT and will operate a large space once it is up and running. Andes of Chile In late 2020.
The money, which was first given to the GMT project by the NMF, indicates that the observatory will be important to the entire U.S. astronomy community, Robert Shelton, president of the GMTO, told Space.com.
“This award really enables us to accelerate our progress on key components,” Shelton said. “And I think it allows us to streamline our content, to showcase a little bit of the project team’s technical expertise, which is unveiled.”
Related: Giant Magellan Telescope conceived in Chile (images)
GMT will integrate seven 27.6-foot-wide (8.4-meter) primary mirrors into a single light-collecting surface at 80 feet (24.5 m) – three times wider than today’s optical telescope. The large space will also feature seven “adaptive secondary mirrors” (ASMs), each 3..3 feet (1 m) wide and only two millimeters thick, with hundreds of actuators attached to its back.
“With that [actuators]”We can bend this second glass surface about 1000 times per second,” GMTO project manager James Fans told Space.com. We use it to compensate for the distortion we have introduced. Earth’s atmosphere. Milliseconds by milliseconds, we measure distortion and correct it, so that we can essentially remove the atmosphere above the telescope and get very sharp images. “
This extreme optics will give GMT 10 times NASA’s famous resolution power Hubble Space Telescope, Said members of the GMT team. Astronomers will use GMT for a variety of high-impact projects, from hunting Signs of life In the atmosphere of a nearby exoplanet to investigate the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which dominates the universe but remains largely mysterious.
Still, all this happening is not walking in the park. For example, no other single-piece telescope mirror is larger than the GMT primary segment. And the surface of all seven primers of the GMT must be ideal for almost perfection: the margin of error is only 25 nanometers (1 million of an inch), about the width of a glass atom.
The seven segments must also be “phased” so that they are precisely arranged and performed as part of the hardware. The newly awarded NSF money will help the GMT team to do and practice only what will be done on a custom built two facing testbed, one at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the other at Ari Rizona University in Tucson. The grant will also allow the team to partially build and test the ASM.
Funding work through the grant will take place over three years and will keep GMT on track for “first light” in 2029, team members said. And the benefits will outweigh the GMT, Fans said, stressing that the technologies on display will also be employed by other telescopes in the future.
GMT development is going well overall, Shelton said, adding that no major impact has yet been seen due to the team Nationwide epidemic of corona virus.
Primary Mirror Segments 1 and 2 are completely finished, and Richard F. of the University of Arizona. Segment 3 is now being polished at Caris Mirror Lab. Selment said and pol is waiting to be polished, and Segment 6 will be cast next month, Shelton said. (Mirror Lab, from casting to final polishing, does all this work.)
October In October 2019, GMTO announced that it has $ 135 million contract signed A 1,800-ton precision steel structure that will be the bones of GMT, with MT Machetronics and Ingersoll machine tools for making and installing the telescope mount.
Shelton said Mount is going through its initial design review.
“That’s what we have to focus on now, making sure that the design will meet our needs, because there is literally an interface with mounting – instruments, mirrors, everything.” “So that’s really the key right now.”
Mike & Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the quest for alien life. Follow him on Twitter મીMamildld. Follow us on Twitter @speed.com or Facebook.
