Demolishing a Mountain For Science: The E-ETL Groundbreaking Happens Today

The top of a Chilean mountain will be demolished today during the groundbreaking for the construction of what will be the world's largest telescope. You can watch a live stream of the groundbreaking ceremony now. 

The blasting event will start at 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET and can be watched live via Livestream.

According to the European Southern Observatory (ESO), this is just one of many stages already taken in order to create a telescope so massive and technologically advanced that it will be able to peer into deep space with an accuracy and clarity never before seen in observational equipment.

The telescope itself, appropriately dubbed the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), will be so large that it cannot simply just sit on a mountain. The top of that mountain will have to be blown off to create an elevated platform for the device and its associated facilities.

While the official size of the E-ELT main building has not yet been established, the telescope's main mirror alone will be nearly 128 feet (39 meters) in diameter. For comparison, the ESO's other brag-worthy telescope array - their current "flagship facility," simply dubbed the Very Large Telescope (VLT) - only boasts main mirrors 8.2 meters in diameter. WIRED reports that even the Keck telescope in Hawaii, one of the largest deep space telescopes to date, has mirrors only a fourth of the E-ELT's size.

According to the ESO, the E-ELT groundbreaking today has been eight years in the making - the E-ELT project first became a feasible reality at the end of 2005. In October of last year, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera formally gave the ESO permission to flatten Cerro Armazones - a 3,060-meter peak that is - conveniently not far from Cerro Paranal, which is the mountaintop home of the VLT.

The president called this agreement "a great step to consolidate Chile as the world's capital of astronomy," adding that the eventual construction of the E-ELT will unveil new secrets of the universe, and that it will be his country's pride to be the host of such monumental discoveries.

The ESO has about 117 square miles (189 kilometers) of land to work with, and hopes to have the E-ELT up by 2020.