Over an eight-year survey beginning in the early 2030s, MUST aims to measure redshifts for more than 100 million galaxies and quasars, building the most detailed 3D map of the universe to date.

The telescope features a 6.5-meter primary mirror and a five-lens wide-field corrector, housing the largest aspheric lens ever manufactured to deliver sharp images across a wide field.

A key bottleneck in astronomy is turning galaxy catalogs into actionable knowledge, which requires spectra—redshift, chemistry, and velocity—for each galaxy.

Source note: this summary references the arXiv preprint From Large Telescopes to the MUltiplexed Survey Telescope (MUST).

MUST will cover roughly 20 times more sky and be about ten times more efficient in surveys than existing instruments like DESI.

DESI currently offers leading spectroscopic capability but is insufficient to catalog billions of galaxies, comparable to draining an ocean with a bucket.

Constructed in Qinghai, China, MUST will deploy over 20,000 robotic fibre positioners on its focal plane to target thousands of galaxies per exposure, vastly accelerating survey speed.

MUST represents a shift from imaging to truly understanding the cosmos through comprehensive spectroscopy and mapping.

The new map will address fundamental physics questions, including dark energy, neutrino mass, tests of general relativity at cosmic scales, and the universe’s state in its first billion years after the Big Bang.