The Giant Magellan Telescope is going into service in 2025, but there’s still a lot of work to do on the mirrors themselves. It’s truly amazing what it takes to make a single mirror and this telescope has several mirrors. When all is said and done the telescope will have 4,000 square feet of mirrors. This gives the telescope resolving power 10 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope. I can’t wait to see the images we’re going to get from this monster when it’s complete.



“These are some of the most difficult mirrors ever manufactured. They’re off-axis, they’re aspheric, very large and ultra precise,” Mirror Lab associate director Jeff Kingsley tells me after I descend from the tower. “Our goal is to get to a point where it takes four years, start to finish, for each mirror.”

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Source: [H]ardOCP – The Astounding Engineering Behind the World’s Largest Optical Telescope