George Mitchell commits $25 million to Giant Magellan Telescope
Pasadena, CA- George P. Mitchell, founder of Mitchell Energy & Development Corp. and The Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, has committed an unprecedented $25-million gift to the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) project. Half of the gift, $12.5 million, has been donated to the Carnegie Institution for Science and half to Texas A&M University, Mitchell's alma mater. Carnegie and Texas A&M are two of the GMT's 10 partners.* The gift will help support the GMT during the next five years.
"George Mitchell has been a driving force behind this project from the beginning," commented Wendy Freedman, chair of the board of directors for the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) and director of the Carnegie Observatories. "His generosity, vision, and dedication to the project will help define the future of astronomy."
The GMT features an innovative design of seven 8.4 meter, or 27-foot, diameter primary mirrors arranged in a hexagon. The seven mirrors, six of which are off-axis, will produce a single telescope 24.5 meters or 80 feet in diameter. The mirrors are under development at the Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory (SOML) at the University of Arizona, another GMT partner. The first off-axis mirror is in the final stages of polishing and is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
The GMT will open a new window to the universe. It is set to begin science operations at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile in 2019. Its resolving power will be far larger than any other telescope ever built and will allow astronomers to answer the most pressing questions of the day including the nature of dark matter and dark energy, black holes, planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy, and the evolution stars and galaxies in the earliest phases of the universe.
"This is an extraordinary time for astronomy given the many mysteries, including dark energy and dark matter, that we do not understand," remarked Carnegie president Richard Meserve. "George Mitchell's exceptional generosity will help us to solve them."
"This gift not only brings the dream of the Giant Magellan Telescope much closer to becoming reality, but also helps propel Texas A&M and the entire state of Texas to the forefront in the important fields of physics and astronomy," said Texas A&M president R. Bowen Loftin.
Thus far, $255.5 million has been raised to support the GMT, a $700-million project. The GMT will have 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope and will operate in the new era of the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's successor.
Provided by Carnegie Institution
