&lt;div class=&quot;track&quot;&gt;&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; src=&quot;http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.22.2/31792?ns=guardian&amp;pageName=British+scientists+bid+for+contracts+to+develop+worlds%27+largest+telescop%3AArticle%3A1641734&amp;ch=Science&amp;c3=Guardian&amp;c4=Science%2CAstronomy+%28Science%29%2CSpace+%28Science%29&amp;c5=Not+commercially+useful&amp;c6=Alok+Jha&amp;c7=11-Oct-03&amp;c8=1641734&amp;c9=Article&amp;c10=News&amp;c11=Science&amp;c13=&amp;c25=&amp;c30=content&amp;h2=GU%2FScience%2FAstronomy&quot; width=&quot;1&quot; height=&quot;1&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;p class=&quot;standfirst&quot;&gt;The UK&#039;s space funding agency is helping British astronomers win contracts to work on the new &euro;1bn telescope&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;British astronomers will be in a prime position to take the leading role in building critical scientific instruments for the world&#039;s biggest optical telescope, thanks to a &pound;3.5m research project announced by the UK&#039;s astronomy and space funding agency. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/e-elt.html&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT)&lt;/a&gt; will be built in Chile in the next decade. It should be powerful enough to uncover how the universe evolved in its earliest years. It could even help reveal whether life exists anywhere else in the cosmos.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Over the next two years, the new fund will be available for UK astronomers at Durham and Oxford Universities, among others, to research and develop prototype instruments and experiment for the telescope project. The final decisions about which countries will build which bits of the telescope will be taken by the European partner nations within the next few months.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &pound;3.5m fund, administered by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stfc.ac.uk/&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;Science and Technology Facilities Council&lt;/a&gt;, is aimed at putting British researchers and companies into pole position to win the bigger contracts for the telescope as the project develops.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Prof Isobel Hook of the University of Oxford, who is working on UK experiments for the telescope, said the money from the council would also allow British astronomers to &quot;have access to the earliest scientific results from this revolutionary telescope &ndash; an exciting prospect&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Work on building the telescope will begin in the next few years. It will have a 40-metre diameter main mirror made of around 1,000 individual hexagonal segments. When it is up and running, by the 2020s, it will be 10s of times more sensitive than any existing ground-based telescope.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The new telescope costing &euro;1bn (&pound;859m) is a project of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), a consortium of 15 countries, all European except for Brazil. It will be built on the Cerro Amazones, 3,500 metres above sea level, near the Paranal observatory in Chile&#039;s Atacama desert. The area has some of the best locations for astronomical observations in the southern hemisphere.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Paranal is already home to the existing world&#039;s largest optical telescope &ndash; the &euro;500m &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/vlt.html&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;Very Large Telescope (VLT)&lt;/a&gt; &ndash; which uses four 8-metre diameter mirrors to survey the skies. The new telescope would be able to make measurements well beyond the VLT, however, allowing it to address mysteries such as what the first objects in the universe were, how many types of matter exist and whether there are any other Earth-like planets in our galaxy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The VLT has been crucial to astronomers in the past decade in making the first direct images of planets outside our solar system, weighing distant stars and making important observations of black holes. But it cannot see small planets; the faintest objects at the edge of the universe, which give astronomers clues about how the universe began, are barely detectable by its mirrors.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bigger telescopes can gather more light and, therefore, produce much more information. The new giant telescope will be able to image faint, previously unseen, objects such as cold stars, baby galaxies and small planets, while collecting far more detail on the more familiar ones. By taking pictures of extra-solar planets, it might even be able to characterise the elements in their atmospheres, allowing astro-biologists a much clearer indication of whether there is the possibility of life on other star systems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the forefront of British scientists bidding to design experiments for the new telescope are teams from Durham and Oxford universities. Among the proposed components is a spectrograph instrument called Harmoni.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Prof Colin Cunningham, of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, said the new &pound;3.5m fund would allow the UK to put itself &quot;in the best possible position to develop key instruments for the E-ELT with its international partners.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The fact that ESO has already highly rated the early designs for these instruments is testament to the world-leading expertise of our scientists and engineers. We are looking forward to turning these designs into exciting new capabilities for the astronomy research community.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;related&quot; style=&quot;float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;&quot;&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/astronomy&quot;&gt;Astronomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/space&quot;&gt;Space&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;author&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/alokjha&quot;&gt;Alok Jha&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;terms&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk&quot;&gt;guardian.co.uk&lt;/a&gt; &amp;copy; 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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