Explore the Design - Giant Magellan Telescope

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The Giant Magellan Telescope is the largest Gregorian optical-infrared telescope in history. It will use seven of the world’s largest mirrors to see farther into deep space than ever before. Its unique design will produce the highest possible resolution of the Universe over the widest field of view. This extraordinary image clarity will enable scientists around the globe to obtain new clues to the fundamental nature and evolution of the Universe — from searching for signs of life on distant exoplanets to investigating the cosmic origins of chemical elements.

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World's most
Powerful
Telescope

200

x

up to 200 times more powerful than existing research telescopes
368

sq m

light collection area
320–25,000

nm

wavelength range from optical to infrared

Location

Las Campanas Peak, Chile

The Giant Magellan Telescope is under construction at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the best locations on Earth to view the heavens.

Enclosure

Protection from the elements

A massive 22-story smart home shelters the Giant Magellan Telescope from harsh weather and extreme earthquakes common in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The 5,000 metric tons enclosure can complete a full rotation in 4 minutes. It’s designed to disappear at night, equalize shifting airflows and temperatures, and reveal the telescope for unobstructed observations as the world's largest mirrors track celestial targets moving across the sky.

Telescope Mount

The supporting structure

At 12 stories tall and 2,100 metric tons, the Giant Magellan Telescope mount is an imposing yet agile structure. The altitude-azimuth mount provides the supporting framework for the world’s largest mirrors, adaptive optics, scientific instruments, and control systems. The steel superstructure sits on a concrete pier that’s 22 meters in diameter and is so stable that it can resist image quality interruptions from even the slightest vibration. While massive, this precision tool is designed to glide frictionlessly in three degrees of freedom so that the 16 metric ton primary mirrors have undisturbed access to study the night sky.

Primary Mirrors

World’s largest optics

The Giant Magellan Telescope’s seven primary mirrors are the world’s largest and most challenging optics ever produced. The primary mirrors are the telescope’s first contact surface that collects incoming light from the night sky. Each 8.4-meter diameter mirror has an astonishingly smooth surface, takes four years to complete, and utilizes 16 metric tons of Ohara E6 low expansion glass. The segmented mirrors have a parabolic shape and are arranged in a unique flower pattern to form a 25.4 meters wide light-collecting surface, the largest of any built telescope to date. The efficient optical design is a world first and promises to see farther into the Universe with more detail than any other telescope before.

Adaptive Secondary Mirrors

Making the atmosphere disappear

Ever wonder why stars seem to twinkle? It’s the Earth’s atmosphere causing turbulence and distorting the starlight we can see from the ground. Adaptive optics counteract this natural blurring effect. The Giant Magellan Telescope has seven adaptive secondary mirrors that use the world’s most advanced optical technologies ever developed — as close to magic as engineering gets. The magic mirrors hang above the giant primary mirrors’ light path, deforming their surface at 2,000 times per second as they collect distorted light reflections and clean them up before sending a concentrated beam of light to the telescope’s scientific instruments.

Scientific Instruments

Designed to discover the unknown

Scientific instruments are the superpowers of the Giant Magellan Telescope. The instruments allow scientists to unlock the secrets of the Universe by dissecting light into spectra and providing detailed chemical analyses of celestial objects and their origin. The Giant Magellan Telescope can accommodate up to ten instruments at once, more than any other telescope. Each one has a unique ability to explore the unknown: from analyzing a distant planet’s atmosphere in search of life to looking back in time to when the Universe first formed. The discoveries they make could rewrite history as we know it… The Universe Awaits™.