ANN ARBOR, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – The University of Michigan (UM) has brought the U.S. into an international collaboration to construct the world’s largest optical telescope, as the first and only U.S. university to participate in the project.

In a press release published Monday, UM announced that the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the lead organization on the project, signed an agreement with UM and many other international organizations for the design and construction of the Multi-Object Spectrograph (MOSAIC), a key instrument on board the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).

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The ELT is a telescope located in northern Chile currently under construction and is expected to begin functioning in 2029. According to the ESO the telescope will be the world’s largest optical and infrared telescope in four years, meaning that it will be the largest telescope which primarily collects light from both the visible and infrared spectrums of light.

The telescope is being constructed under a consortium of 16 European countries, but UM’s involvement brings the US into the picture.

The MOSAIC, the instrument UM will help develop, will analyze light wavelengths on the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and provide critical data on astronomical objects, including chemical composition, temperature, distance, and age.

Christopher Miller, a UM professor of astronomy, and several other UM faculty are involved in the early stages of planning on the project, according to the release.

Miller said that the telescope will likely take better astronomical photos than the James Webb Space Telescope, a telescope in Earth’s outer orbit.

“This instrument and this telescope will be, in almost all cases, better than the JWST in terms of its power to see the distant past and in terms of its fineness of detail,” said Miller in the release.