On the heels of this earlier contribution to the University of Texas Medical School, Houston businessman and philanthropist George Mitchell has made a $1.25 million gift to provide initial funding for a massive project involving both UT and Texas A&M University that has a goal of building the world’s largest telescope on the Andes Mountains in Chile by 2015. If successful, the $400 million Giant Magellan Telescope is expected to collect 70 times more light than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and could produce images that are 10 times sharper.
The telescope’s six large mirrors will surround a seventh central mirror, all on a single mounting, and its light-collecting area would be twice the diameter of today’s largest telescopes. The world’s two largest optical telescopes ? each 33 feet in diameter ? operate at the W.M. Keck Observatory on the summit of Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano.
Mr. Mitchell donated the money to Texas A&M University, which is his alma mater, and The University of Texas at Austin — which runs the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of far West Texas, which is the third largest telescope in the world — will match Mr. Mitchell’s contribution over the next two years. Other partners in the project are the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Harvard University, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona and the University of Michigan.