Motors drive vision of galaxies far, far away

“And the Lord said let there be light.” The famous words from Genesis may have passed the lips of engineers, scientists and businessmen in December 2014, when the Council of the European Space Organisation ESO approved the construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT. The green light on the two-phase build opened up the market for components required to build this enormous, pan-European project, valued Euro1.083bn at 2012 prices.

Located in Cerro Armazones, deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the telescope’s scientific purpose is to search for exoplanets – planets outside our known universe – and the stellar composition of nearby galaxies.

An extremely large telescope needs extremely accurate moving parts. E-ELT’s five mirrors must align precisely to steer the beam toward a Nasmyth focal surface, where the final visible image is produced. The E-ELT will gather more light than all of the existing 8-10 metre class telescopes in the world combined, and 100 million times more light than the human eye.