ELT: The biggest eye in the world

In the Chilean Atacama Desert, a superlative telescope is currently being built that is pushing the limits of technical imagination. The segments of the telescope mirror can be positioned with an error of less than two nanometers - a massive feat of mechanics and control electronics. Brunel employee and embedded software specialist Michael Pangrate was a member of the development team. CollaborationEngineeringjobsFuture

This blog was originally posted by Brunel Germany. See original post here.

Those responsible for the project dare to make a big comparison: "The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will revolutionize our perception of the universe, just as Galileo's telescope did 400 years ago". The planned properties of the telescope are impressive and will fundamentally expand astrophysical knowledge: the ELT will collect 100 million times more light than the human eye and 13 times more than any other terrestrial telescope. With this skill, the ELT will be used to search for exoplanets and the first galaxies in the universe, investigate supermassive black holes, and research the nature of dark matter and dark energy. 

The ELT is developed by ESO, the European Southern Observatory. It was founded in 1962 by Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden to give European astronomers access to the southern starry sky. In 2012, ESO decided to build the ELT, which cost around 1.1 billion euros, on the 3,046 m high Cerro Armazones mountain. The ELT is scheduled to start work in 2025 - with a main mirror 39 m in diameter and a light collecting area of 978 m², it will be the world's largest telescope for visible light and near infrared.
 

Three actuators each precisely connect a hexagonal mirror segment with the support structure of the telescope. The actuators actively control the segment position in all three directions by lifting and tilting in two axes.