Dragonfly FRO, LLC, a Focused Research Organization (FRO), has announced the construction of MOTHRA, a next-generation telescope.
MOTHRA employs a first-of-its-kind distributed aperture architecture with special filters to isolate the faint light of hydrogen gas.
The FRO, a new type of scientific enterprise, was launched in partnership with Convergent Research and backed by Alex Gerko, the founder and CEO of XTX Markets.
A radical new telescope design for probing the spaces between galaxies
MOTHRA is a distributed-aperture telescope composed of 1,140 high-end Canon telephoto lenses, which together synthesise the power of a single giant telescope.
This design has grown out of the Dragonfly Telephoto Array concept, which demonstrated the capability to find and study extremely faint, extended structures, previously undetected using conventional telescopes.
MOTHRA is a dramatic upscaling of Dragonfly, enabling it to detect ultra-faint gas between galaxies that traces the dark matter distribution of the universe.
This "cosmic web" is a complex network of structures imprinted in space at the earliest moments after the Big Bang, growing to enormous size as the universe expanded.
MOTHRA can be precisely tuned to detect faint glowing light from intergalactic gas trapped by this web of dark matter. The telescope will not just reveal where the gas is, but also how it moves along the spokes of the web.
"MOTHRA is a telescope designed around a single idea: maximise discovery space for the dim glow of intergalactic gas," said Pieter van Dokkum, Co-Founder of Dragonfly FRO.
"The combination of a huge effective aperture, wide field, and tuneable ultra-narrowband filtering opens a new observational regime."
MOTHRA is being built at Obstech/El Sauce Observatory in Chile. The telescope's construction started in the spring of 2025. and it is expected to become fully operational by the end of 2026.
By fusing its many images together digitally, the array of 1,140 telephoto lenses will be the equivalent of a single 4.7m diameter lens.
It will be the world's largest all-lens telescope, with capabilities that are unmatched by any other telescope on Earth or in space.
"This is an ambitious project to build something astronomers have wanted for a long time: a practical way to directly see the cosmic web, and to get it done in a couple of years rather than decades," said Roberto Abraham, Co-Founder of Dragonfly FRO.
"MOTHRA harnesses advances in optics, detectors, and computing power to look at the universe in a new way. The telescope is totally unique."
A new model for tackling hard scientific problems
Dragonfly FRO is the first Focused Research Organization centred on astrophysics. Inspired by the pace and focus of tech startups, FROs are designed to tackle bottlenecks and build high-impact scientific public goods over a finite multi-year timeline.
These efforts are often too large or too infrastructure-heavy for a single academic lab and don't fit traditional funding structures or market-driven models.
"Focused Research Organizations are built for precisely this kind of problem: a clear mission, a hard technical bottleneck, and a capability that can benefit an entire field," said Anastasia Gamick, President and Co-Founder of Convergent Research.
"Dragonfly FRO brings the FRO model to astrophysics, and MOTHRA is the kind of ambitious, enabling instrument that this model makes possible."
The launch of Dragonfly FRO and MOTHRA has been made possible through a donation from Alex Gerko.
"Breakthrough instruments developed at speed often require new approaches – organisationally and technically," said Gerko.
"I'm proud to support such an ambitious project focused on generating long-term scientific value, and to help pioneer a model designed to drive meaningful research progress on hard, foundational astronomical challenges."