Shortly after lunch on Thursday afternoon the silence of the Atacama desert in
Chile will be rudely broken by the dull crack of dynamite sending a rush of mountain rock skywards.The explosion, planned for 2pm local time (7pm BST, 5am Fri AEST), marks the start of a months-long project to lop the top off the 3,000m-high Cerro Armazones. Once the dust has settled and the rubble has been cleared, the mountain will be smaller, flatter, and ready to host the largest optical and infra-red telescope in the world.
The
(39 m) European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT, will serve astronomers and cosmologists for generations to come. Size, as the name implies, matters. Some 2,500 tonnes of steel rigging are on order to hold a
primary mirror nearly 40m wide. That is large enough to see the faintest light from the earliest stars, and pick up signs of life on planets far beyond our solar system.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2...-other-planets
http://new.livestream.com/ESOAstrono...groundbreaking
Should be a blast