'There's no telescope this large ever built. It's not like we have a precedent for how to do these things,' Giant Magellan Telescope engineers on why they used the Unreal Engine to build an unprecedented telescope simulator

High atop a 2,514-foot plateau in Chile’s dramatic and arid Atacama Desert sits a window into our universe – the Giant Magellan Telescope.

Just 40% complete and with a price tag of over $2.5 billion, the massive telescope with its 25.5-meter mirror may be our best chance to find a planet like ours, called an exoplanet – and, perhaps, even life like ours.

But that dream could be almost a decade away, and in the meantime a consortium of countries, universities, scientists, and engineers must complete the project and learn how to work it safely and maintain it.

For that, they’ve turned to gaming – or, more precisely, to one of the preeminent 3D game-creation platforms: Unreal Engine.

“Video game engines pretty much lend themselves to simulating physical environments, and they've gotten so sophisticated, now, especially Unreal Engine, and user-friendly,” said Christopher Madden, Giant Magellan Telescope Senior Mechanical Engineer.
“So, we saw a huge opportunity in using Unreal Engine to try to help simulate and give us a tool to kind of practice, create a training tool before we get out there, to reduce risk for the project.

Madden and his team have essentially built a centimeter-for-centimeter simulation of the Giant Magellan Telescope, from the giant, segmented mirror to the massive rolling base that turns slowly and precisely to allow the aircraft-carrier-sized bay doors to keep pace with the telescope as it tracks objects billions of miles away.

Aptly named Builder of Observatory Behavior, or BOB for short, the system has been developed in partnership with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, a platform that also powers popular games like Fortnite, PUBG, Final Fantasy, and Batman: Arkham Knight.

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Why build a fully functioning replica that you can walk through and even operate machinery within? One reason is its unprecedented nature.

"There's no telescope this large ever built," said Ryan Kallabis, Magellan’s Director of Communications, "it's not like we have a precedent for how to do these things."

“This is a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar project. And we use seven of the world's largest mirrors, and they cost anywhere around $30 million apiece, and they take four years to make. So, losing or breaking one would be a big problem for the project. Having tools like this, BOB, to simulate how you would move, polish, maintenance them before it actually gets live is a huge value.”

This BOB makes so much sense

I virtually stood inside BOB, controlling the default Unreal mannequin via a web-based streaming interface to walk her through the corridors and up into the complex machinery of the telescope and the building’s rotation system. It’s not a high-resolution rendering, but the detail is there, and it can, if necessary, output HD images.

Even in this digital form, it’s clear that this is a monumental structure. Kallabis told me, “The enclosure, which houses all the mirrors, optical technologies, instruments, and software, and controls […] is 65m tall, and […] roughly 60m in diameter as well. It is the largest enclosure for a telescope that's ever been built for […] this type of Gregorian telescope.”

The telescope mount is 30m tall and holds the seven giant mirrors, each of which is 8.4m in diameter, arranged like petals on a flower. Together, they make up the giant, 25.5m-wide light-collecting surface.

The way that this telescope, and most of its kind, work is by collecting light from the night sky, focusing and reflecting it back up into a much smaller set of mirrors, and then shooting that light back down into a barrel housing the image sensors.

At one point in our demo, Madden positioned the avatar atop one of the mirrors to give me a sense of scale. It looked like an ant on a giant, reflective flower.

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It’s a complex system with untold challenges for use and upkeep. Even its Chilean location offers up particular hurdles.

“The temperature extremes are quite acute, and then also it has to track objects in the sky,” explained Kallabis. “So, these mirrors are moving, and they're multi-ton mirrors. I think they're about eight tons a piece, and they're tracking objects, billions of light-years away. And so, we need to keep them consistent in their shape, and that cell that it's on [high-tech platforms for each mirror] allows for the heat.”

One of the issues is that these mirrors need a fresh coating of their reflective surface almost every three months. That means they must partially disassemble the telescope and move the mirror to the building’s base to prepare it for recoating.

“The space we’re working with is limited,” Madden told me. “The limitations are real. So the planning has to be very good, and when it comes down to even the support requirement you're going to need in the area, not just the main equipment for the telescope itself, but you know, ladders, toolboxes, the number of personnel who really have to have a good idea of how much space we have when we have it.”

That’s the beauty of the Unreal-based BOB system. It allows the team to game out the entire scenario and train for it. Plus, it’s built in such a way that people who don’t have training in building or working with, say, a complex CAD system can use it.

“You just kind of [need] general video game knowledge to use it instead of having familiarity with the CAD platform,” said Madden.

Taking a telescopic test drive

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The controls are game-like. To move about the BOB virtual Giant Magellan Telescope, I used a combination of laptop keyboard presses that would be familiar to anyone who’s done a little PC gaming. I pressed W to move forward, A to move left, D to go right, and S to move back. If you have a game controller, you can use that instead. There’s also a drone mode that lets you basically fly through the massive structure – I struggled a bit to control that one, though.

I approached an accurate recreation of a boom, hopped in, and used the controls to lift the basket up for a better view of the mirror array. I couldn't figure out how to lower it, so I jumped out. The similarity to game play was palpable.

Madden guided me to step virtually outside. I approached a red truck and was told to get inside; however, when I approached the right side of the pickup truck, nothing happened. Madden instructed me to go to the driver’s side. I suggested, though, that the simulation work, in this instance, a bit more like PUBG or Fortnite, where you can approach a vehicle from almost any side and hit a key to enter. BOB may see that in a future update.

Once inside the truck, I started to drive around the telescope building’s perimeter – for a few seconds ¬– before driving off a ledge and rolling the truck onto its roof. Madden agreed he needed to add a guardrail there.

My experience, in a way, proves the value of the BOB system, which, true to its gaming roots, also supports multiplayer… er multi-user interactions.

“You could have a bunch of people in different parts of the world working on the same problem,” said Kallabis.

With billions of dollars and countless hours of expertise pouring into this almost one-of-a-kind observatory, team and individual training will be critical.

“If somebody was going to use this as a training tool, the person training would have knowledge of what's even available at site…what the actual conditions are. It'd be, I think, invaluable… as opposed to having somebody completely untrained to show up on-site,” said Madden.

At one point, Madden showed me the process of replacing one of the buildings’ giant, motorized wheel trucks. It’s a complex, multi-step operation that requires literally lifting portions of the building to move out the equipment. It was all represented in virtual form via a collection of canned videos that Madden recorded within the BOB system.

That process, which not only shows how to do it, but also how the challenges of moving these parts in the building’s sometimes small spaces, plays out across a series of seven videos that engineers can watch over and over again. In theory, that knowledge will then make the real-world process that much easier and safer.

Protecting a window into the cosmos

Building such a virtual recreation in a CAD system like AutoCAD might be possible, but Unreal brings specific and almost unmatched capabilities that seem perfectly built for this system.

“With Unreal, you're able to really visualize a mesh-based model, very complicated geometry. Also, Unreal has Nanite. With Nanite – it’s a miracle – you can just basically, throw some very messy models in there,” said Madden.

The pair explained that the value of preparation offered by BOB cannot be understated, noting how at other telescopes the process of, say, moving or recoating a mirror has resulted in one of them getting chipped or damaged.

“Every ounce of preparation we can do beforehand really helps prevent those things from happening,” said Madden.

It’s not just about maintenance and repair. There is one other big benefit to using this gaming engine. “Unreal Engine has a built-in new feature in 5.7 called Celestial Vault that has realistic skies. You put the location and the data in, and it actually gives you real star charts for those areas. So, I have integrated that into this, too,” explained Madden.

Basically, you can simulate the entire experience of using the Giant Magellan Telescope with the BOB system, and its capabilities help clear a path for the true purpose of this giant star gazer.

Situated approximately 160km from the nearest city and given the location's dry climate, the Giant Magellan Telescope may enjoy 300 clear nights per year. When it comes online sometime in the 2030s, this will give it the best possible chance to detect faint objects and fulfill its mission of finally finding those thousands of Earth-like exoplanets rotating relatively close to their home stars.

“This is one of the first telescopes in human history that'll be able to potentially detect Earth-like planets for the first time,” said Kallabis, “So Chris here is creating a simulation for maintenance and, safety behaviors so that we can keep this telescope operational and continue doing good science for the lifespan of the observatory, which is roughly 50 years.”

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