Wendy Freedman remembers a high school teacher who would occasionally tell his class that 'the girls don't have to listen to this.' The statement left a mark on Freedman's memory and inspired her to work hard in the fields of science and astronomy. In her TED Talk This new telescope might show us the beginning of the universe Freedman discusses the construction and launch of the Giant Magellan Telescope.
Freedman says that the southern hemisphere will be the most active zone to get information about the cosmos in the next century. There are already several telescope arrays near Chile but the Great Magellan Telescope will bring new methods and operations to the area.
Two international groups are building large optical radiation telescopes, and a survey telescope will scan the entire sky every few nights. Radio telescopes will look for long wavelength radio information. The James Webb telescope will launch in 2018 as a space telescope looking at infrared information.
The Giant Magellan Telescope will be the largest optical telescope in existence. The seven mirrors will be 8.4 meters in diameter, and will stand 43 meters high. Freedman gave the talk at TEDGlobal in Rio de Janeiro and compared the GMT's height to the Cristo Redentor statue. The telescope's enclosure will be 60 meters high and rotate on a base that weighs 2000 tons. The resolution will be ten times the resolution of the Hubble space telescope and be 20,000,000 times more sensitive than the human eye.
Wendy hopes that the Giant Magellan Telescope will allow us to look back at the first light of our universe. A great point that Freedman makes is that Galileo made the first telescope two inches in diameter, and every time we've increased the size and scope of telescopes we've learned new information about the universe.
Wendy Freedman is a great entertaining speaker, able to give the right mix of wonder about the universe and useful information. She definitely gives the impression that the project is worth being the major project of her lifetime and the information that she eventually receives from the telescope will be well worth the effort. The GMT is expected to have excellent viewing conditions for 300 nights a year in Chile's Atacama Desert, at an elevation of over 2,550 meters. $500,000,000 was committed as of June 3, 2015 for the project to move forward as the first of its kind in a new generation of extremely large telescopes. The project is currently on track to have all seven mirrors completed by 2024, with additional optical instruments coming online in a second phase of construction.