Science, Space and Technology News 2024
This artist’s rendering shows a night view of the Extremely Large Telescope in operation on Cerro Armazones in northern Chile. The telescope is shown using lasers to create artificial stars high in the atmosphere. Credit: ESO/L. CalçadaSet for completion this decade, the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile will be the largest telescope globally, with a main mirror spanning 39 meters and made from 798 precision-engineered segments.
The primary mirror of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope , known as M1, will be by far the largest mirror ever made for a telescope. With a diameter of more than 39 meters, M1 is too large to be made from a single piece of glass and will instead consist of 798 hexagonal segments, each about five centimeters thick and 1.5 meters across, working together to collect tens of millions of times as much light as the human eye.
Also involved in the work done on the M1 segment assemblies are: Dutch company VDL ETG Projects BV, which is producing the segment supports; the German-French FAMES consortium, which has developed and is finalising manufacturing for the 4500 nanometric-sensors monitoring the relative position of each segment; German company Physik Instrumente, which designed and is manufacturing the 2500 actuators able to position the segment to nanometric precision; and Danish company DSV, which is in charge...
Once polished and assembled, each M1 segment is shipped across the ocean to reach the ELT Technical Facility at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert — a 10,000-kilometer journey that over 70 M1 segments have already completed. In Paranal, only a few kilometers away from the construction site of the ELT, each segment is coated with a silver layer to become reflective, after which it will be carefully stored until the telescope’s main structure is ready to receive them.
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