ESO@esoastronomy@mastodon.social
How do you cool house-sized instruments to –270°C… right in the middle of #Chile 's Atacama Desert?
That’s one of the challenges behind our Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), whose astronomical instruments (the largest ever built!) must stay ultra-cold to catch the faintest cosmic signals.
The solution: giant custom cryogenic facilities, built on a scale never attempted before, as so often with the ELT 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms194oA_xaw
#astrodon #astronomy #astrophysics #space #science #engineering