Giant Magellan Telescope Projected To Dwarf NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in Power, Sharpness

This weekend, technicians located in Arizona plan on starting the steps towards building a giant mirror glass that will be part of a new telescope that is expected to have better resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Technicians are busily working on the mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope, which is expected to weigh roughly 20 tons and be 27 feet across when it is polished in one year's time. The process begins Saturday inside a rotating furnace at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Lab in Tucson.

The mirror will be the third of seven mirrors that will be part of the telescope, configured to give it an aperture of 80 feet which will let its handlers correct for any diffraction of light by Earth's atmosphere while coming close to what in theory is the best possible resolution for the telescope.

"Let's imagine you took this mirror and you enlarged it to the physical size of the United States. The tallest mountain on that surface would be 1 inch tall," Michael Long, vice president of GMTO Corp., the nonprofit organization based in Pasadena which is coordinating the Giant Magellan Telescope, told the L.A. Times. "So it's incredibly tight tolerances that have to be maintained, even when the mirror is in the telescope itself."

Expected to be completed in 2020 in Northern Chile, the $700 million telescope is expected to have a resolving power that will be 10 times more powerful than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The telescope will be used to help astronomers detect and characterize exoplanets while investigating dark matter and dark energy, among studying other space phenomenon such as the physics of black holes.

The design of the GMT telescope lays out the seven mirrors which will be arranged in a manner that will give the telescope an aperture-or the device's opening-an unprecedented size. The size will aid engineers as they attempt to gaze through the Earth's atmosphere, which has caused several issues for space telescope operators for many years.

"Astronomical discovery has always been paced by the power of available telescopes and imaging technology," Peter Strittmatter, head of the Steward Observatory's astronomy department, told Fox News. "The GMT allows another major step forward in both sensitivity and image sharpness."