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.