Streaming Live by Ustream

Watch as engineers take the first step in constructing the Giant Magellan Telescope by leveling the top of Cerro Las Campanas, a mountain in Chile, with explosives.

Live streaming of the event will begin at 9 a.m. PDT on March 23.

The Giant Magellan Telescope – one of a new generation of enormous telescopes – will consist of seven 27-foot-diameter mirrors arranged like the petals of a flower, giving it the resolving power of an 80-foot-diameter mirror. Along with the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope, it will dwarf the current generation of 30-foot telescopes such as the U.S. Keck Observatory and European Very Large Telescope.

Cerro Las Campanas is in Chile at the southern end of the extremely dry Atacama Desert. The arid location makes for exceptionally clear nighttime skies, which will be a great benefit for astronomers. The mountaintop will be leveled to provide a large platform for the GMT. The Las Campanas range is already the site of the 21-foot Magellan Telescopes.

The GMT is expected to help astronomers see the formation of the earliest galaxies in the universe, understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and probe the atmospheres of exoplanets around other stars for signs of life.

Ground-based telescopes suffer distortion because the Earth's turbulent atmosphere garbles incoming light from the universe. Most new telescopes, including the GMT, rely on a technique known as adaptive optics, which bends their mirrors in such a way to correct for the atmospheric disturbance and provide a steady view.

GMT is a collaboration between a number of U.S. universities as well as the Australian and Korean governments. The project is expected to cost around $700 million dollars and be completed by 2018.

Image: Giant Magellan Telescope - GMTO Corporation.