They proved that THE MOST could record a high-resolution spectrum for every object in a field-of-view that also happens to be 100 times greater than any prior astronomical telescope.

They point to Isaac Newton to make our case. At the same time that he used a primary objective spherical mirror to build astronomical his telescope, in his equally famous Double Prism Experiment, which Newton called his Crucial Experiment, Newton showed that if the light from a primary disperser passed through a tiny hole to a second disperser he saw a single color.

Newton used prisms as dispersers. We designed a flat compact telescope system where the primary objective is a modern day disperser, a diffraction grating. We have shown that spectra can be forced to appear near the grating plane itself, at what is called a "grazing angle." After collection by a small mirror at this "grazing" angle, starlight is focused onto a slit and then, just like Newton's experiment, dispersed again. The resulting image shows each object collected over an arc covering the entire sky appearing at a unique wavelength.. Astronomers call the wide arc a high "étendue" or "extension," hence the name, "The High Étendue Multiple Object Spectrographic Telescope."