Industry

Opportunities for collaboration in the construction of CTAO

Industry

Building the largest gamma-ray observatory on the planet requires great investment, people and resources. With facilities, activities and partners worldwide, it is clear that the CTAO will have a social and economic impact in countries around the world, both through direct procurement processes and indirectly through its In-Kind Contribution teams. In this sense, CTAO is a multidimensional endeavor whose collaborations and activities comprises a multitude of different fields, from science institutions to industries, from day-to-day services to long-term investments.

Industry Procurement Opportunities

CTAO’s procurement initiative is to collaborate with industry in an open and unbiased way in order to achieve the best possible results for the execution of its mission. The establishment of the CTAO-ERIC, expected in early 2023, is a fundamental milestone in the more than thirty-year lifetime of the Observatory.

 

The beginning of this legal entity ends the design phase and initiates the construction and operation phase of the Observatory. CTAO foresees a significant increase in the annual investment of CTAO-ERIC over the coming years. Main investments can be classified into four areas:

 

  • Construction and related facilities: temporary construction camps; design, study, inspection, certification services for temporary camp installations; local CTAO offices; mechanical and electrical workshops and warehouses; outfitting of control rooms; computing rooms and other facilities, etc.
  • Detector and calibration instruments development: telescope foundation design and construction at both sites; construction of telescopes, including camera systems; Integration and testing of computing software; calibration system engineering, including hardware and software of all-sky cameras, ceilometers, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems, aerosol monitoring systems and muon calibration systems; environmental monitoring instruments, including earthquake detection and monitoring systems, etc.
  • Electrical and mechanical systems: construction preparation for data network and electrical cables; low voltage distribution system construction; backup power systems, including dynamic UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) systems; power distribution system design, including electrical power distribution system at medium and low voltage level to all consumers, etc.
  • Information and Communication Technologies: document management systems; IT hardware and software; user networks at the sites and facilities; tools to support collaborative software development, such as repositories, wikis, issue tracking, as well as tools to enhance software quality, such as systems for continuous integration and software quality inspection tools; common software tools and libraries, used across all major software systems to ensure that computing products share an implementation and interface; software architecture support and applications to support all architecture activities in the computing work packages and over the full life-cycle of the project, etc.

 

The total CTAO-ERIC’s investment value for the period 2022-2026 and beyond is around 270 million euros, which include in-kind contributions from member organisations. Such investment brings a range of opportunities of cooperation between scientific research and engineering and technology businesses, as well as other companies at a global level.

 

This page will promote the invitations to tender for the CTAO gGmbH and its In-Kind Contributors. Those interested in opportunities with the consortium design teams are encouraged to contact the team leaders found throughout the Project pages of this site or the national/regional representatives listed below directly.

Current CTAO gGmbH and In-Kind Contributors opportunities:

For setting up the detailed construction schedule across the project, the CTAO is seeking consultancy services for its Project Office in Bologna (Italy) in the area of Project Scheduling. The consultant will work in close contact with the CTAO Project Manager and the relevant Project Office departments in the following tasks:

 

  • Establish, monitor and update a set of detailed project schedules for all areas of the CTAO construction project using standard coding and existing work breakdown structures (WBS) as well as information from in-kind contribution teams (contribution to the regular update of the WBS will also be required).
  • Perform a roll-up of the various schedules into a single consolidated CTAO plan.
  • Set up the needed systems and planning tools within the CTAO Project Office.
  • Work closely with CTAO staff and in-kind contributors to obtain necessary schedule Information.
  • Perform schedule control by establishing critical path reviews, planned value, earned value, schedule variance, and recommend corrective actions as required.
  • Report on a regular basis to the CTAO Project Manager on schedule condition, delivery status, and other parameters.
  • Initiate and prepare periodic project reports, setting up a standard format appropriate for the task, focusing on programmatic aspects and delivering a number of Project Key Performance Indicators, to be defined in cooperation with the CTAO Project Manager.

 

All information is available in the Tender Dossier documents (Request for Proposals and Annex I, Annex II, Annex III and Annex IV).

 

Request for clarification should be submitted in writing by email to ctao-procurement@cta-observatory.org

All responses, which are considered by CTAO to be of a substantive nature, will be sent in anonymous way to all applicants invited to submit a proposal. Any questions that are of a sensitive nature must be clearly identified as such on submission.

 

Deadline for request for clarifications: 13.02.2023 – 23:00 CET

Response to req. for clarifications by: 20.02.2023

Deadline for Submission of Proposals: 28.02.2023- 23:00 CET

Within the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR, in Italian), released by the European Union after the COVID-19 pandemic, the INAF (Italian National Institute for Astrophysics), in collaboration with INFN (the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics) and in close cooperation with the CTAO, submitted the CTA+ Project to the Italian Ministry for University and Research, which was awarded 70 million euros in June 2022 after a competitive review performed by a board of international referees. The programme gathers a series of Work Packages (WP) to provide further support in the implementation of CTAO, as part of the already existing and established Italian participation to the CTAO ERIC. The WP, which are focused on enhancing the CTAO Southern Array (Chile),  include:

 

  • End-to-End  (electro-mechanical structures, mirrors, cameras, electrical systems…) of two new Large-Sized Telescopes (LSTs)
  • Electromechanical structures of five new Small-Sized Telescopes (SSTs)
  • Enhancements for the science of transient sources (follow-up observations)
  • R&D on new detectors for Cherenkov telescopes
  • Science & Outreach in Italy

 

Procurement Process:

  • It will be carried out according to the European Rules but also aiming to preserve the know–how developed by INAF, INFN and the other international groups involved so far in the development of the CTAO telescopes (in particular, the LST and SST).
  • All the activities will be done in close cooperation with the CTAO Project Office.
  • Tenders for the SST and LST electromechanical structures are currently being prepared.

 

Procurement Timeline:

 

  • The industrial procurement phase will formally start after Jan 1, 2023.
  • Industrial providers to be defined by the end of 2023.
  • Industrial activities to be completed by the end of 2025.

 

Further information:

All future tenders issued by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), CTAO hosting partner, can be found on  the Spanish public sector contracting platform: link.

Current member countries with regional industry contacts:

Gavin Rowell, University of Adelaide

Elisabete M. de Gouveia Dal Pino, Instituto de Astronomia, Geofisica e Ciencias Atmosfericas – Universidade de Sao Paulo

Vitor de Souza,  IFSC, CCNH-UFABC, IFUSP, SAIFR, UFPR, UFSCar

Andreas Reisenegger, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Elina Lindfors, Tuorla Observatory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Turku

Jim Hinton, Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heidelberg

Markus Garczarczyk, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY)

Julia Tjus, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Varsha Chitnis, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Masha Chernyakova, Dublin City University

John Quinn, University College Dublin

Nicola Giglietto, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare

Giovanni Pareschi, Istituto Nazionale di AstroFisica

Masahiro Teshima, ICRR, University of Tokyo

David Berge, University of Amsterdam

Jacek Niemiec, H. Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences

Juan Calvo, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

Yvonne Becherini, Linneuniversitetet

Teresa Montaruli, Université de Genève

Achim Vollhardt, Universität Zürich

Mimmo della Volpe, Université de Genève

Roland Walter, Université de Genève

Dr. Saran Poshyachinda, National astronomical Research Institute of Thailand

Paula Chadwick, Durham University

Garret Cotter, University of Oxford

Tim Greenshaw, University of Liverpool

Jon Lapington, University of Leicester

Bohdan Hnatyk, Astronomical Observatory of Kyiv National University

David Kieda, University of Utah

Nepomuk Otte, Georgia Institute of Technology