The biggest telescope in the world is aptly named the Very Large Telescope, and is located in Chile. It is made up of four separate 8.2m (27ft) mirrors, each one more than a billion times more powerful than the naked eye. It is so powerful that it is even able to spot an astronaut on the Moon. The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico is the world’s largest curved focusing antenna. Its dish is 305m (1000ft) in diameter, and made up of almost 40,000 aluminium panels.
Next-generation ground telescopes received priority designation from a long-awaited report by the National Academy of Sciences. They would join a host of existing ground telescopes and smaller space telescopes already peering at supernovas, galaxies and other distant objects in the starry skies.
Three planned optical telescopes in the 98-foot (30-meter) range would house some of the biggest mirrors yet for collecting light from distant cosmic objects. And proposed radio telescope would dwarf predecessors by using many antenna stations to create a total collecting area of a square kilometer, or 0.4 square miles.
Here’s a look at ten of the present and future giants among ground-based telescopes that provide scientists a glimpse of the past universe through time and space.
A new ground-based observatory that would scan the entire available sky every three nights from Chile could see first light by 2014. The $465-million Large Synoptic Survey Telescope would give astronomers their best view ever of how billions of faint starry-sky objects change over time. It could also tackle questions relating to the nature of dark energy, and perhaps track space rocks that might collide with Earth in the future.
The optical telescope would image each region of the sky 1,000 times over 10 years with an almost 28-foot (8.4-meter) aperture. It represented a top priority among ground projects slated for the next 10 years in the Astro2010 Decadal Survey by the National Academy of Sciences.
This 30-foot (9.2-meter) telescope represents the largest ground-based optical instrument in the southern hemisphere, and concentrates on spectroscopic surveys. A main mirror consists of 91 hexagonal mirrors that join together to form the larger hexagonal primary —not unlike the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in Fort Davis, Texas.
Like HET, SALT also has a fixed-angle design that has complicated observations since it began operation in 2005. But the instrument can still view about 70 percent of the sky observable from Sutherland, South Africa.
The twin 33-foot (10-meter) telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory represent the second largest optical telescopes on Earth, located close to the summit of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. Each instrument’s main mirror consists of 36 hexagonal segments that work together.
Keck I became operational in 1993, followed just a few years later by Keck II in 1996. The combined observatory has helped astronomers examine events such as last year’s impact on Jupiter. It also deployed the first laser guide star adaptive optics system on a large telescope in 2004, which creates an artificial star spot as a reference point to correct for atmospheric distortions when viewing the sky.
Picture Credit : Google
