Texas A&M University has announced a $25 million commitment from Houston businessman George P. Mitchell to support construction of the $700 million Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT).

The gift from Mitchell and the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation will be awarded to the Carnegie Institution for Science, home to Carnegie Observatories and headquarters of the Giant Magellan Telescope Corporation. Mitchell's previous pledges to the project include a $5 million gift last fall and the $3.25 million he and his wife contributed in 2004 — a gift that established his alma mater as a founding partner in what will be the world's largest and most powerful telescope.

To date, $255.5 million has been raised in support of the project. Located high above the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, the telescope when completed will be equipped with seven 8.4 meter primary mirror segments, each weighing twenty tons, that together are expected to provide the power of a single 25-meter mirror. Even though it is land-based and potentially limited by atmospheric conditions, the GMT will be capable of collecting seventy times more light than the Hubble Telescope and provide images up to ten times sharper.

"The gift...comes at an extremely important time to help fund the final design of the telescope, which will put the GMT well ahead of the other giant telescope project funded out of California," said Nicholas B. Suntzeff, director of Texas A&M's astronomy department. "We will be able to point this telescope anywhere in the southern skies and see farther than anyone else on Earth, even very close to the edge of the universe."