Australian scientists will help construct one of the world’s most powerful ground-based telescopes that promises to see further and clearer than the Hubble Space Telescope and unlock mysteries of the early Universe.

The team will develop a new, world-first instrument that will produce images three times sharper than Hubble under the multimillion-dollar project.

The MAVIS instrument will be fitted to one of the eight-meter Unit Telescopes at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope in Chile, to remove blurring from telescope images caused by turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere. MAVIS will be built over seven years at a cost of $57 million.