We were born on November 2, 1989, a year of change and a landmark from the social and cultural perspective.
No better year could have been chosen to give substance to a long-standing idea.
It all started in 1976: at that time Mr. Marchiori was employed at a noteworthy company where grinding trains were designed and built. These 100 metre-long, yellow trains were driven along the railway lines to correct the deformations caused by the flange wheels of freight or passenger trains. He would have later been the founder of EIE in 1989, together with Mr. Panetti and his son Diego.
1986 saw the turning point, with the participation to a Call for Tender issued by ESO ( European Southern Observatory), one of the biggest scientific organizations in the world, for the construction of the most revolutionary Rotating Building of the NTT – New Technology Telescope, to be installed at La Silla, in the Atacama desert in Chile. It was a completely new world, technologically fascinating, about which everything still had to be learned: from the project specifications written in English and translated into Italian, to the understanding of words that couldn’t be translated like seeing, the magic number of the astronomers, expressed in arc seconds; or windscreen, that elusive barrier, permeable to the wind and that slides up and down protecting the telescope against the buffeting of desert winds. With the NTT the use of thin mirrors was first adopted, 24cm thick on a surface with a 3.58m diameter. Glass in te mirror was replaced with a new conception material: the zerodur, which has a very low thermal dilatation coefficient. Still, the use of thin mirrors presents a problem, consisting in a faster image deterioration due to the inclination of the telescope. Active optics was therefore studied and applied through actuators placed underneath the main mirror in order to gain the best performances.
The NTT can definitely be considered the practice laboratory where those new technologies were experimented. Those same technologies that today still underlie the functioning of the biggest ground-based telescopes.
It was the beginning of a long adventure indeed; from the NTT, to the four VLT (Very Large Telescope) Telescopes, to the LBT ( the giant binocular telescope of Mount Graham Observatory in Arizona, with two 8m diameter mirrors), up to the fundamental phases of the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) Project, the biggest radio-telescope in the world, now fully delivered to Science.
As technology and scientific challenges persisted, little by little we entered the era of giant telescopes. Among these the E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) by ESO, which will see light by 2020. With its 39m diameter, it will have the biggest mirror ever conceived. Together with this, far-reaching progress has been made in the field of radio-astronomy, culminating in the involment of EIE in the design and development of the biggest radio-telescope ever built: the SKA – Square Kilometre Array – an array of about 3000 highly performing, low cost antennas scattered across an area of about one square kilometre.
If we can tell our story today, it is because in these years we have been able to put together different ingredients transforming them into defined geometries and groundbreaking, innovative solutions. To do so, we have always put heart and passion, originality and creativity, sense of adventure and solid awareness in all of our contractual battles, in the constant search for industrial and scientific excellence.
On November 22, 2014, we celebrated our first 25 years, and we will be soon celebrating our 30. This is EIE today:
