Blog: Telescope Development Charges Ahead

It’s been an exciting summer for telescope and astronomy enthusiasts. After 20 years, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera was finally completed in California and delivered to NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory at the top of Cerro Pachón in Chile in May.

This 3,200-megapixel digital camera is the largest in the world and next year will start providing scientists with images with a field of view seven times wider than the moon in the pursuit of understanding dark energy and dark matter, mapping the Milky Way, and surveying the solar system, according to the National Science Foundation. It will be installed with Rubin's new 8.4-meter primary mirror and 3.4-meter secondary mirror after completing several months of testing.

Meanwhile, the Giant Magellan Telescope is now under construction, also in Chile (although the actual telescope itself will be built in the U.S. and reassembled on site) at Las Campanas Observatory. It will use seven massive primary mirrors—the last of which just began its four-year fabrication process in 2023—spanning 368 square meters combined, to investigate the origins of chemical elements and search for signs of life on other planets. 

In June, the Giant Magellan Telescope’s design and engineering team at IDOM announced that the telescope’s 65-meter-tall enclosure passed its final design review. This will be one of the largest mechanized buildings ever built, weighing in at more than 5,000 metric tons. The enclosure will fully rotate within four minutes and have 46-meter-tall shutter doors for the 25.4-meter telescope. Giant Magellan is about 40 percent complete, with its opening planned for the early 2030s. 

Over in Chile's Atacama Desert, construction is progressing on the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope (ESO’s ELT). In June, the blank for the last of the telescope’s 949 primary mirror segments was delivered. When fully assembled, the primary mirror will have a diameter of more than 39 meters. The ELT passed the halfway point of construction in 2023 (after nine years), and the ESO expects it will begin operations toward the end of the decade. 

But there are even more telescopes on the horizon—many of them space telescopes—despite the fact that there are still some fairly new devices hanging out in nearby space. In July 2023, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Euclid Space Telescope, which is already sending back images in optical and near-infrared light as it helps scientists seek out properties of dark energy and dark matter. 

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NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched XRISM, or X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, in September 2023. This telescope's mission is to study celestial objects that emit X-rays 

Meanwhile, the biggest space telescope to date, the James Webb Space Telescope, has been in space for less than three years. This infrared telescope has a 6.5-meter primary mirror and features a tennis court sized five-layer sunshield. Its development alone took decades and $10 billion. 

But development of the next massive space telescope is already underway at NASA: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is expected to have a field of view 100 times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope. With Roman, astronomers hope to find answers about dark energy and exoplanets. Its launch is planned by 2027. 

Also on the horizon is a space telescope from the ESA, as part of the ARIEL, or Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey. This telescope will detect the kinds of atoms and molecules that exist in an exoplanet’s atmosphere when it launches in 2028. 

Before that, however, the ESA will launch the PLATO, or PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars Space Telescope in 2026. The agency will use PLATO to study terrestrial planets that are orbiting in the habitable zone around stars similar to our Sun. 

There’s also the China National Space Administration’s Xuntian Space Telescope, which is currently under construction and expected to launch in mid-2025. But unlike Euclid and Roman, which detect near-infrared light, Xuntian will detect near-ultraviolet and optical light. 

Of course, this is just a small snapshot of the innumerable telescopes engineers are developing around the world that will soon adorn mountaintops and reside among the stars to help humanity gain a greater understanding of the universe.

Louise Poirier is senior editor.