Get this: a collective of Arizona technicians are going into work today to pour the glass for a massive mirror that will measure 27 feet in diameter. Believe it or not, this is not the beginning plot point of a villainous James Bond movie scheme, but the first stage in the manufacture of a space telescope, called the Giant Magellan, which will trump the Hubble in resolution by 10 times. According to a report from The Los Angeles Times, the mirror will take a full year “to polish to within 1/20 the wavelength of light.”

But while the new telescope will be a true force to be reckoned with as far as looking into the far reaches of space is concerned, it won’t be a single well-polished mirror that gives it the advantage. In fact, the mirror is the third that has been cast by the University of Arizona Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory, and four more are on the way in the coming months and years.

The Giant Magellan Telescope design takes advantage of all seven mirrors, which will be laid out in a manner that give the scope an unparalleled aperture – the device’s opening, hole, or gap. The massive aperture, in turn, will allow engineers to gaze straight through Earth’s atmosphere, which has long caused trouble for ground based telescopes.

Naturally, since casting and polishing the mirrors is a long and meticulous process, the Giant Magellan will not actually be in operation until 2022. The first of the seven mirrors has been approved for telescopic use, while the second is just entering the year-long polishing process. Eventually though, the telescope will set up a home base in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where it will be able to join with other major telescopes from around the globe – and in orbit – to form a major initiative for the photographic exploration of space.

Michael Long, the head of the non-profit organization that is currently working to coordinate the Giant Magellan project, says that the telescope will even have the power and resolution to gaze Earth-sized planets in other solar systems.