Professor Richard McDermid

But this is a very special one.

It's called an adaptive secondary mirror.

And it can actually change its shape very subtly and very quickly.

And that allows the full telescope to be part of this method called adaptive optics that corrects for the distortion caused by Earth's atmosphere.

So they've actually built that technology into this telescope.

So MAVIS is going to benefit from that, but it's actually going to multiply that effect by additional mirrors that can change their shape very quickly called deformable mirrors.

so that we actually get three of them working in concert.

So that's kind of part of this unique multi-conjugate adaptive optics technology.

And then, because that's not hard enough, we're going to try and do it in a new wavelength regime that makes it even more challenging.

We're going to try to use the light, the kind of colours or frequencies, wavelengths of light that our eyes can see.

So astronomers call this optical wavelengths or optical light.

That makes adaptive optics technology quite difficult to do.

Those wavelengths that our eyes can see are relatively short on astronomical terms.

When the wavelengths get short, all the errors that you have to think about in your device become a lot more stringent, a lot more hard to make.

So it's challenging to do this kind of adaptive optics anyway.

It's even more challenging to do it at visible or optical wavelengths.

So MAVIS is really kind of pushing the boundaries of what this kind of technology can do.

And then it's feeding this powerful instruments that help us take, you know, very detailed images and also break the light up into its rainbow of colors, the spectrum of colors that contains a lot of astrophysical information.

Yeah, we'll pop it on the telescope early next decade.

So it's going to be around 2031 when we, in the current schedule, will be having it start to see the sky for the first time through the telescope.