On 25 May the European Southern Observatory (ESO) officially awarded the biggest industrial contract every signed, worth almost 400 million euros, to a consortium of Italian companies
The contract, won by Italian industries Astaldi, Cimolai, and sub-contractor EIE Group, concerns the construction of the rotating dome of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), ESO’s futuristic project aimed at building the world’s largest optical/near-infrared telescope. E-ELT will be erected on the Cerro Armazones, a 3,000 metre peak near ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in northern Chile. Its rotating dome will have a diameter of 85 metres and a height of almost 80 metres, a dimension comparable to a football field. The design comprises a reflecting telescope with a 39.3-metre-diameter segmented primary mirror and will comprehensively weigh 5,000 tons.
The gigantic telescope will be fitted with very high-tech systems (the telescope’s structure comprises a mobile volume of more than 3,000 tons, to be positioned with an accuracy close to the millimetre) and is designed to acquire images 15 times clearer than those from the Hubble orbiting telescope. The telescope is certain to give a strong thrust forward to the study of astrophysics. Indeed, the E-ELT’s giant eye is expected to make new discoveries in the field of extrasolar planets and progress in the understanding of supermassive black holes and of the dark matter that seems to pervade the Universe although no proof of it has yet been produced.
The contract signing ceremony was held at ESO’s offices in Garching (Munich), at the presence of Tim de Zeeuw, the Director-General of ESO, the president of Astaldi, Paolo Astaldi, and the president of Cimolai, Luigi Cimolai. The ceremony was also attended by the Italian Consul General in Munich, Renato Cianfarani, the Board Chairman of ESO, Patrick Roche, the president of the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), Nicolò D’Amico, the Science Attaché in the Embassy in Berlin, Matteo Pardo, and the president of the EIE group, Gianpietro Marchiori. The guest of honour of the event was Stefania Giannini, the Italian Minister for Education, Universities and Research (MIUR).
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, which pays Italy’s annual contribution to ESO and participates in the E-ELT project in association with the MIUR through the INAF, expressed special satisfaction for Italy’s great success.
«The adjudication of this contract to our industry is further proof of the competitiveness and capability of our scientific and production sectors when they act together with our institutions, forming a single system» said Vincenzo De Luca, Director General for Cultural and Economic Promotion and Innovation.
The new contract adds on to the ones already signed for EELT in 2015 with AdOptica, a consortium of Italian companies Microgate and ADS and the National Institute of Astrophysics, yielding a comprehensively positive return to Italian industry.
