Transport of the Second Magellan 6.5 Meter Primary Mirror
August 8, 2001
In late June the University of Arizona finished testing the second
Magellan Project 6.5 meter primary mirror at the Steward Observatory
Mirror Lab in Tucson. The mirror is one of the finest large mirrors
ever made surpassing the successful Magellan 1 mirror in surface
quality.
On July 17 the mirror in its transport box and the cell that supports the
mirror in the telescope were loaded on two trucks bound for the Port of
Long beach. At 9 am the convoy departed from Tucson. The
7-meter wide loads of the mirror and cell extended over a full two lanes
of the highway. A police escort and pilot vehicles cleared traffic
out of the way for the oversize loads.
Construction on Interstate 10 blocked the direct route from Tucson to
Long Beach. The convoy was routed through Yuma on Interstate 8,
around San Diego and up the southern coast of California arriving safely
in the port at 2 am the following morning after threading its way through
the traffic of two major metropolitan areas, construction zones, and
tight interchanges.
The shipment was loaded on-board the container vessel TMM Quetzal in the
middle of the night on July 20-21 and set sail for Chile early next
morning. It arrived at the Port of Coquimbo 15 days later where it
was off-loaded onto trucks for the final 150 km trip to Las Campanas
Observatory. At 2 am August 6 the convoy headed north on the
two-lane Pan American highway arriving on the mountain at 10:30 that
morning. The mirror was unloaded from the trucks and is now safely
stored inside the aluminizing building. Installation in the
telescope is scheduled for November of this year.
Images of the arrival of the mirror in Chile taken by Virginia
Johns and Frank Perez are below.
Last Updated on Wednesday, August 8, 2001
www@ociw.edu
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