There will be two international groups
that are going to be building
giant telescopes, sensitive
to optical radiation, as our eyes are.
There will be a survey telescope
that will be scanning the sky
every few nights.
There will be radio telescopes,
sensitive to long-wavelength
radio radiation.
And then there will be
telescopes in space.
There'll be a successor
to the Hubble Space Telescope;
it's called the James Webb Telescope,
and it will be launched in 2018.
There'll be a satellite called TESS
that will discover planets
outside of our solar system.
For the last decade,
I've been leading a group --
a consortium -- international group,
to build what will be, when it's finished,
the largest optical
telescope in existence.
It's called the Giant
Magellan Telescope, or GMT.
This telescope is going to have mirrors
that are 8.4 meters in diameter --
each of the mirrors.
That's almost 27 feet.
So it dwarfs this stage -- maybe
out to the fourth row in this audience.