The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the Chilean desert, will feature a range of scientific instruments, the first of which has now entered manufacture. And the UK’s Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC) will play its part.

Once complete, it will feature a 39-metre main mirror, enabling it to track down Earth-like planets around other stars and probe the furthest reaches of the cosmos.

The project first came about in 2005 through the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which brought together a consortium of international partners to help it bring this feat of engineering to life.

The ELT programme was officially approved in 2012, and in 2014 construction of the €1.45bn telescope got underway at Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama desert.

A decade later, the ESO has now announced that the ELT’s first scientific instrument – the Mid-infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph (METIS) – has passed its final design review phase and it has given the go-ahead for manufacturing...