The best thing about the future of astronomy is that it starts with a bang. Today, you can watch as the European Southern Observatory takes the first step in building the world’s biggest ground-based telescope—the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT)—by blowing up the top of a mountain in Chile. The blasting event will start at 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET.

It’s not just a name—the E-ELT is going to be humungous. The telescope’s main mirror will be nearly 128 feet in diameter. The current crop of really big telescopes pale in comparison. The Keck telescopes in Hawaii, for instance, have mirrors about 33 feet wide.

What do you get for all that light-gathering power? For one thing, the ability to see back to the beginning of the universe, watching the first stars and galaxies form. Researchers will also use the E-ELT to help them figure out the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. But the thing that has astronomers more excited about right now is the telescope’s ability to discover and characterize new planets around other stars.

“We want to get direct images of an Earth twin,” said astronomer Jochen Liske, who works on the E-ELT.

Though thousands of extrasolar planets have been found in recent years, scientists still know little about most of them beyond their size and the length of their year. The E-ELT will be large enough to peer at the nearest stars to our sun and directly spot tiny planets in orbit around them. From this light, astronomers should be able to determine the types of chemicals and gases that exist on the planets’ surfaces, which in turn could help them figure out whether or not any of them are capable of hosting life as we know it.

Besides its size, the E-ELT’s locations will help make it an astronomical discovery factory. After a long deliberation process, ESO officials chose Cerro Armazones in Chile as their preferred site in 2010. The mountain rises above the exceptionally dry Atacama Desert, which creates a still and clear atmosphere for it to peer through. Today’s blasting event will chop about 55 feet from the top of this 10,000-foot peak. Subsequent controlled explosions will help clear a large flat space to begin building the observatory, eventually removing around 1,750 tons of rock.

Construction of the E-ELT also marks the beginning of the race to build the world’s next premier ground-based telescope facility. Though ESO’s observatory will eventually be the largest, both the Thirty Meter Telescope and the Giant Magellan Telescope are in a similar size-class. All three telescopes are expected to be up and running in the early 2020s, meaning that astronomers will lots of big new toys—and hopefully lots of big new discoveries.