Reflecting hope: Concentrating solar power can feed the grid and perhaps even remove carbon from Earth's atmosphere
In recent years, Heliocon and the promise of CSP has attracted the interest of two of the best mirror and optics experts on earth: Roger Angel and Daewook Kim of the University of Arizona and its Wyant College of Optical Sciences, and Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory.
Angel is the current and founding director of the UA’s famed Mirror Lab, whose large-mirror innovations have revolutionized ground-based astronomy.
Kim’s expertise in optical engineering has ensured precision and the best-possible views of the Universe from many existing world-class instruments, including the coming Giant Magellan Telescope with its seven 27-foot diameter mirrors. Link to SPIE Article
UArizona Sky School
UArizona Sky School provides immersive, inquiry-based science programs to Arizona K-12 students. Field experiences focus on science areas such as sky island ecology, earth sciences, dendrochronology, hydrology and astronomy. UArizona science graduate students serve as instructors and mentors. For many of our public-school students, this is their first visit to public federal land, their first experience hiking or their first chance to interact with or see themselves a professional scientist and researchers.
Giant Magellan Telescope Enclosure Ready for Construction
The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) and IDOM today announced that the telescope’s enclosure, set to be one of the world’s largest astronomical facilities, passed its final design review and is now ready for construction in Chile. The review marks a major milestone for the telescope, which is now 40% under construction. This also marks an important year for Steward Observatory, as a founding partner in the international consortium for the GMT. On October 6, 2024, fabrication commenced on the seventh and final primary mirror at UArizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab. These events put the GMT on track to be operational by the early 2030s.
“A team of ten international subject matter experts validated two years of design work by IDOM and the Giant Magellan Telescope. The final design of the enclosure is unique and an important feat of technical management, design, and engineering. We are very grateful for the committee’s professional assessment as we proceed towards construction,” said Bruce Bigelow, the Site Infrastructure, Enclosure, and Facilities Manager for the Giant Magellan Telescope. “We’re also incredibly excited to be moving towards the procurement stage, where we will begin soliciting proposals to begin construction.”
Once completed, the 65-meter-tall enclosure will be one of the largest mechanized buildings ever constructed and will represent a true feat of modern engineering and precision manufacturing. At over 5,000 metric tons, the enclosure will be able to complete a full rotation in four minutes and be equipped with 46-meter-tall shutter doors that reveal the 25.4-meter telescope for unobstructed scientific observations. The smart building is cleverly designed to control the telescope’s operating environment by protecting seven of the world’s largest mirrors as they track celestial objects across the sky more than a billion light years away.
Following the successful conceptual design of the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope dome, IDOM continues to make important contributions to the design of astronomical facilities with the Giant Magellan Telescope—built by an American-led international consortium of 14 universities and research institutions. The breadth of talent afforded by the consortium is stimulating America’s economy with construction, testing, and design work on the telescope in 36 states.
“We formed a strong and productive partnership with IDOM as the enclosure designer. Their well-known architectural accomplishments combined with their engineering expertise in large and complex movable structures has been critical to the design of this unique structure,” said Giant Magellan Project Manager William Burgett. “The dedication and attention to detail that the IDOM team has demonstrated has been instrumental on our way to becoming one of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world.”
IDOM began developing the Giant Magellan Telescope enclosure design over two years ago following a competitive, global search and extensive evaluation process.
“Our team approached the challenge of the Giant Magellan Telescope enclosure knowing that this structure would be responsible for enabling some of the most important scientific discoveries of our lifetimes,” said IDOM North American President Tom Lorentz. “We are proud to have delivered a successful design and look forward to the Giant Magellan Telescope’s success.”
Construction of the telescope components housed within the enclosure are advancing rapidly. For example, over the past year, fabrication commenced on the seventh and final primary mirror in Arizona, while manufacturing of the 39-meter-tall mount structure began in Illinois. Other advancements include near completion of the telescope’s first adaptive secondary mirror and significant progress on a suite of high-resolution imagers and spectrographs in Arizona, California, Massachusetts, and Texas.
These optical technologies will enable the Giant Magellan to boast a remarkable tenfold increase in resolution compared to the Hubble Space Telescope and deliver up to 200 times the power of today’s best telescopes. The breakthrough technologies will empower scientists worldwide, offering unparalleled insights into the evolution of the Universe, the origins of chemical elements, and the discovery of life on distant exoplanets for the first time.
With the enclosure design milestone complete, the Giant Magellan Telescope is now preparing a global search for a firm to leave their mark on the future of astronomy with construction of the enclosure.
About IDOM
IDOM is a privately held, global engineering, architecture, and consulting firm, with more than 5,000 employees and 46 offices around the world. Headquartered in Bilbao, Spain, IDOM has U.S. locations in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Houston and Rochester, NY. To learn more about IDOM, visit idom.com/en.
About Giant Magellan Telescope
The Giant Magellan Telescope is the future of space exploration from Earth. Using seven of the world’s largest mirrors, the 25.4-meter telescope will produce the most detailed images ever taken of our Universe. It will uncover the cosmic mysteries of dark matter, investigate the origins of chemical elements, and verify signs of life on distant planets for the first time. Giant Magellan is the work of the GMTO Corporation, an international consortium of 14 universities and research institutions representing the United States, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Israel, South Korea, and Taiwan. The telescope is being built in America and will be reassembled and completed in Chile by the early 2030s. The Universe Awaits at giantmagellan.org.
Native American representatives gather with UArizona leaders for third Tribal Leaders Summit
Tribal leaders from across the state gathered at the University of Arizona Monday to meet with campus leaders and discuss ways to strengthen partnerships between the university and tribal communities in Arizona.
The event, hosted by the university's Office of Native American Initiatives and Tribal Engagement, was the third Tribal Leaders Summit the university has held since 2021.
After the meeting sessions on campus, tribal leaders were shuttled to the university's Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, where they spent the evening atop Mount Lemmon stargazing through telescopes and hearing from university astronomers about discoveries made at the site.
The evening on the mountain capped a day of mutual learning.
"When we're given opportunities to create new partnerships, it's so important to take advantage of them and to be in close proximity and have dialogue with people at the university," said Rocha, the Eller alumnus and Yavapai-Apache Nation member. "It's so important for each of us to get that learning opportunity with one another."
UArizona graduate student and team discover most distant supernovas ever found
Peering deeply into the cosmos, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is giving scientists their first detailed glimpse of supernovas from a time when the universe was young.
A team using JWST data has identified 10 times more supernovas in the early universe than were previously known. A few of the newfound exploding stars are the most distant examples of their type, including those used to measure the universe's expansion rate.
"Webb is a supernova discovery machine," said Christa DeCoursey, a University of Arizona graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory who led the research. "The sheer number of detections, plus the great distances to these supernovae, are the two most exciting outcomes from our survey."
DeCoursey presented the findings this week at a press conference at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin.
Glimpses of a volcanic world: New LBT images of Jupiter's moon Io rival those from spacecraft
New images of Jupiter's volcano-studded moon Io, taken by the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona, offer the highest resolution of Io ever achieved with an Earth-based instrument. The observations were made possible by a new high-contrast optical imaging instrument, dubbed SHARK-VIS, and the telescope's adaptive optics system, which compensates for the blurring induced by atmospheric turbulence.
The images, to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, reveal surface features as small as 50 miles across, a spatial resolution that until now had been achievable only with spacecraft sent to Jupiter. This is equivalent to taking a picture of a dime-sized object from 100 miles away, according to the research team. SHARK-VIS allowed the researchers to identify a major resurfacing event around Pele, one of Io's most prominent volcanoes. According to the paper's first author, Al Conrad, the eruptions on Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system, dwarf their contemporaries on Earth.
"Io, therefore, presents a unique opportunity to learn about the mighty eruptions that helped shape the surfaces of the Earth and the moon in their distant pasts," said Conrad, associate staff scientist at the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory. The Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, is part of Mount Graham International Observatory, a division of the University of Arizona Steward Observatory.
Conrad added that studies like this one will help researchers understand why some worlds in the solar system are volcanic but not others. They also may someday shed light on volcanic worlds in exoplanet systems around nearby stars.
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