Design
The telescope's "eye" will be 39.3 meters (about half the length of a football pitch/soccer field) in diameter and will gather 15 times more light than the largest optical telescopes operating at the time of its development. The telescope has an innovative five-mirror design that includes advanced adaptive optics to correct for the turbulent atmosphere, giving exceptional image quality.
The primary mirror for the 39.3 metre design will be composed of 798 hexagonal segments, each 1.45 meters across but only 50 mm thick. A special correcting mirror in the telescope will be supported by more than 6,000 actuators that can distort its shape a thousand times per second. The telescope main structure will weigh about 2,800 tons.
Read more about this topic: European Extremely Large Telescope
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