Question: what date will the telescope be built by

Anna Scaife answered on 17 Nov 2014:

The new telescope I’m working on now will finish the first phase of its construction – that’s when the first serious science starts – in 2023. But before then we’ll be building two precursor telescopes to test out the hardware on a smaller scale. Those will be working in a couple of years from now and even though we won’t be able to do the very big projects with them, they’ll still produce really good science data. It’s my favourite part, working with the early instruments – you can do some small scale speculative science that might turn out to be really important 🙂