29 May, 2017
Scientists are a step closer to understanding the inner-workings of the universe following the laying of the first stone, and construction starting on the world's largest optical and infrared telescope.
The world's largest optical telescope, the European Extremely Large Telescope (EELT), is being built in Chile which is emerging as the future capital of space monitoring infrastructure.
Located on a 3,000 meter-high mountain in the middle of the Atacama desert, it will become operational in 2024. The ETL is also being equipped to be able to correct turbulence in the atmosphere while observing distant planets and star systems. But the telescope promises to offer much more than just size, as it has the potential to go above and beyond what the Hubble Space Telescope now offers.
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said the project illustrated the potential for global cooperation. Attendees included the President of the Republic of Chile, Michelle Bachelet Jeria, and Tim de Zeeuw, the Director General of ESO, as well as a host of other Chilean government officials and ESO scientists and engineers.
The main mirror will have 800 hexagonal sections, each with a diameter of 1.4 meters, created to fit together exactly, and is to protected by a 80-meter dome (illustrated above).
The ELT is the result of the partnership between numerous world's finest scientists, including talents from ESO and the University of Oxford.
The ELT is being built by the European Space Observatory in collaboration with the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) as well as scientists at the University of Oxford, who are designing and building the spectrograph called HARMONI, which can take thousands of images at a slightly different color.
The casting of the ELT's secondary mirror was forged in Mainz, Germany. "It will tackle a broad range of scientific challenges, including probing Earth-like exoplanets for signs of life, studying the nature of dark energy and dark matter, and observing the Universe's early stages to explore our origins." expressed ESO.
ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world's most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far.
The European Extremely Large Telescope will be housed in an 80-meter-tall dome - an area comparable to football pitch.
The ELT was originally envisaged in the late 1990s and is projected to cost 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), mainly from European donors.
