Giant Magellan Telescope Mirror #5 Casting and Annealing
Nov. 2, 2017
With the casting of its fifth giant mirror segment at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona, the world's largest telescope clears a major milestone toward completion.
Sporting a flowerlike primary mirror design of six circular segments surrounding a seventh in the center, the Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT, will provide astronomers with a one-of-a-kind tool to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the cosmos and our place within, including searching for signatures of biological activity on planets outside our solar system