News
The Conceptual Design Report for the proposed Giant Magellan Telescope has been made available to the scientific community and the general public on the telescope project's web site (www.gmto.org). The report, the result of more than three years of work by scores of scientists and engineers, was reviewed by a panel of independent experts this spring. The document details all of the major components of the telescope and provides a blueprint for the next phase of this ambitious international effort.
Figure: Instrument mounting below the main mirrors
From the report's introduction:
"The GMT Consortium has begun to design and build the first of the next generation, extremely large telescopes. The GMT is based firmly on the heritage of the highly successful Magellan telescopes, which, thanks to their superb site and excellent design, routinely produce the sharpest images of the current generation of ground-based large telescopes. The GMT will continue in this tradition, and will offer sharp images over wide fields in natural seeing, and with seeing enhanced by ground layer adaptive optics. In addition, the GMT will routinely produce diffraction-limited images with powerful adaptive optics systems designed into the telescope. The GMT will be a powerful tool for addressing the key astrophysical problems of its era, beginning in approximately a decade.
Our goal in this document is to lay out a technical description of the GMT and our performance goals for the telescope, its instruments, adaptive optics system, and support facilities at a conceptual design level. We hope that we have captured some of the excitement and inspiration that we have felt working together on the GMT Project as well as presenting a comprehensive
technical discussion."
To access the full GMT Conceptual Design Report, visit http://www.gmto.org/CoDRpublic.
