The University of Texas at Austin (UT) will make an additional $45 million investment in the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile, per a school-issued press release.
The ground-based extremely large telescope, which has been under construction since 2015, has so far received a little over $110 million from UT, the release said.
“In partnership with top researchers from around the globe, [UT] astronomers will use the ground-breaking [GMT] to help unravel mysteries and make incredible discoveries,” UT President Dr. Jay Hartzell said in a tweet. “The universe awaits!”
According to the release, aside from UT, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), the University of Arizona and the University of Chicago also financially pledged to the GMT.
The money will go toward the manufacturing the 12-story telescope structure at Ingersoll Machine Tools in Illinois, the continuation of progress on the telescope’s seven primary mirrors at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab in Arizona and the construction of the GMT Near Infrared Spectrograph (GMTNIRS) at UT, the release said.
Taft Armandroff is the head of UT’s McDonald Observatory and serves as vice-chair of the GMT Organization board.
The release said that Armandroff is pleased with how the six institutions banded together to provide financial assistance toward the telescope.
“GMT will provide transformational observing capabilities to our faculty, students and researchers,” he said in the release.
The National Academy of Sciences Astro2020 Decadal Survey had just evaluated the GMT as a core partner of the U.S. Extremely Large Telescope Program, classifying it as a top priority, per the release.
Upon completion, the telescope will let astronomers peer farther into space with more detail than they would with any other optical telescope previously, UT said.
