The design of the dome for the largest optical telescope in the world has been completed

Members of the GMTO consortium and their industrial partners have completed the design of the 65-meter dome for the giant optical telescope GMT under construction.

The construction of this dome will allow the assembly of all the main components of the telescope to begin in the Chilean Las Campanas Observatory located at high altitudes.

A report published by the consortium stated: “After completing its construction, the 65-meter-high GMT Dome will be one of the largest automated structures in the history of modern engineering. Despite its mass of 5,000 tons, the dome will be able to make a complete rotation in four hours.” Minutes. At the same time, it will be equipped with curtain doors 46 meters high to protect the telescope from natural storms.

As the report noted, the dome of one of the largest ground-based telescopes in the history of astronomy was developed jointly by members of the GMTO consortium and the European architecture firm IDOM, which developed the conceptual design for another giant telescope under construction, the European Large Telescope ELT.

It took about two years to design this dome, due to the unique nature of the project and its unprecedented size. According to current estimates by GMTO participants, construction of the telescope is 40% complete, assembly of one of GMT's adaptive secondary mirrors is now finishing, and production of the telescope's final primary mirror and various optoelectronic components, including spectrometers and photosensitive arrays, has begun.

About the GMT telescope

The GMT (Giant Magellan Telescope), the largest telescope in the world with a classic lens and mirror design, has been under construction since 2017 at the Las Campanas Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert. Its construction project is funded by 12 leading scientific institutions in the United States of America, Australia, Brazil and South Korea. Once completed, the GMT will be one of the largest optical telescopes on Earth.

The telescope will contain a composite main mirror with a diameter of 24.5 m, which will be assembled from seven individual mirrors with a diameter of 8.4 m. The total mass of the telescope, excluding the dome, will be more than 2.1 thousand tons, and its construction cost will exceed 2 billion dollars. Once completed, GMT will have a resolution 200 times that of current ground-based telescopes, and 10 times that of the Hubble Orbiter.