Giant Magellan Telescope

Riley Pettrone, La Grange Crane Service

The most powerful telescope on Earth will survey the skies from Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert. The South American location in Chile was selected for its optimal weather and global position to peer lightyears into deep space.

It will not be ready until 2027, once all the puzzle pieces are put together.

Often, record-breaking, mind-altering, reality-bending feats of engineering are not recognized for what they truly are – a million-piece jigsaw puzzle. The Giant Magellan Telescope is being celebrated for what it will accomplish once all the pieces are put together. It will be a pretty picture.

But if you flip the script on this giant telescope and zoom in with a microscope, you will find an immensely complex construction project that is taking shape 5,000 miles from Chile in La Grange Crane’s backyard.

Ingersoll Machine Tools (IMT) has been selected to manufacture, assemble, and test the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Rockford, IL. IMT engaged with La Grange Crane to evaluate their new 40,000 sq ft facility and utilize 3D Lift Plan to hoist the first 80 and 120-thousand-pound puzzle pieces safely into place.

The massive steel girders are the key component of the indoor overhead cranes that will empower IMT’s team of 200 to assemble a telescope 10 times more powerful than the Hubble.

La Grange Crane was selected by merit and reputation. As the two-time 3D Lift Plan Champion, La Grange Crane’s Riley Pettrone has the credibility and 3D Lift Plan expertise to put Galileo’s mind at ease.

Coming at it from all angles, La Grange Crane was challenged to hoist the steel super-loads through proportionately impossible roof openings on each side of the structure. The building was enclosed prior to protect the precious materials that come with telescope production.

3D Lift Plan’s unique ability to aggregate an entire fleet‘s crane configurations for max-machine utilization landed La Grange Crane on the Liebherr LTM 1450-8.1; a 550 Ton Crane with Luffing Lattice Jib commonly referred to as The BBC (Big Black Crane).

A ground bearing pressure report for site stability served as the perfect cross-reference for the site specifications annotated on 3D Lift Plan.

The measure of success with 3D Lift Plan is not a crane vendor’s ability to paint a pretty picture fit for a refrigerator, but a side-by-side comparison of how the project is planned and how a project is performed.

If it looked like an ordinary day in Rockford, IL outside the Ingersoll Machine Tools facility in Winter of 2021, it was.

It always is when you stick to the 3D Lift Plan.

The first Giant Magellan Telescope puzzle pieces are in, let’s play.