The Giant Magellan Telescope received official approval on June 11 from the National Science Foundation to advance into its Major Facilities Final Design Phase, one of the last steps before it can receive federal funds for construction. 

The investment is made in partnership with 15 different universities and institutions, including UT, according to the McDonald Observatory news release. If the telescope is approved for the Major Facilities Design Phase, it will meet the requisites to receive federal funds, although the University has already invested over $100 million into the project. 

“No single university could do it themselves, so they have to band together,” said Taft Armandroff, director of the McDonald Observatory and vice chair of the Giant Magellan Telescope. “We found a bunch of like-minded institutions that wanted to get together and excel in astronomy, make this tool available to our faculty and our students, and we all came together to do it.” 

Although the telescope is a collaborative effort with multiple institutions helping with different parts of the telescope, UT specifically leads the creation of the Giant Magellan Telescope Near-Infrared Spectrograph, according to the news release. Armandroff said this device will let the telescope break light from space into its component parts, allowing astronomers to analyze planets more closely. 

“Faculty, technicians, engineers and students are all involved in building that here,” Armandroff said. “We’ll also use the telescope extensively, so people are already kind of imagining what they’ll use it for, and we’re involved in planning out the requirements for the telescope to make sure it can meet all of our scientific needs.” 

The telescope is set to be built in the Atacama Desert in Chile due to a lack of light pollution in the area, existing astronomy investments and a stable atmosphere, allowing for less light distortion, Armandroff said. Despite physically being more than 4,000 miles away, University students and researchers plan to access and use the telescope in a lab. 

“We will be able to bring (people), we will set it up so we can bring classes in to watch that,” Armandroff said. “We are going to try to do what we can to mitigate the fact the telescope is so far away to have as much remote access here in Austin as possible.” 

The project is the largest private investment made in ground-based astronomy, backed by nearly $1 billion, according to the news release. Armandroff said the telescope will be able to answer unsolved mysteries the past generation of telescopes just could not, on top of bringing astronomy talent to the University. 

“When you walk around campus, you see the chemists have a lab here and the biochemists have a lab there, where they are doing their research and they are training students,” Armandroff said. “For astronomy, we don’t have labs; the telescopes are really our labs. “By having access to one of the most powerful telescopes, it will allow us to attract some of the best astronomy faculty.”