The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is the pre-eminent intergovernmental science and technology organisation in astronomy.
It carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities for astronomy to enable important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research.
ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in the Atacama Desert region of Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. ESO’s first site is at La Silla, a 2400 m high mountain 600 km north of Santiago de Chile. It is equipped with several optical telescopes with mirror diameters of up to 3.6 metres. The 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope broke new ground for telescope engineering and design and was the first in the world to have a computer-controlled main mirror, a technology developed at ESO and now applied to most of the world’s current large telescopes. The ESO 3.6-metre telescope is now home to the world’s foremost extrasolar planet hunter: HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher), a spectrograph with unrivalled precision.
Each year, about 2000 proposals are made for the use of ESO telescopes, requesting between four and six times more nights than are available. ESO is the most productive astronomical observatory in the world, which annually results in many peer-reviewed publications: in 2013 alone, over 840 refereed papers based on ESO data were published. Moreover, research articles based on VLT data are in the mean quoted twice as often as the average. The very high efficiency of the ESO’s “science machines” now generates huge amounts of data at a very high rate. These are stored in a permanent Science Archive Facility at ESO headquarters. The archive now contains more than 1.5 million images or spectra with a total volume of about 65 terabytes (65,000,000,000,000 bytes) of data. This corresponds to the content of about 30 million books of 1000 pages each; they would occupy more than 1000 kilometres of bookshelves!
The ESO Headquarters are located in Garching, near Munich, Germany. This is the scientific, technical and administrative centre of ESO where technical development programmes are carried out to provide the observatories with the most advanced instruments.
ESO works with industry to carry out projects and to build instruments and telescopes, including the E-ELT, the world’s biggest telescope, which is planned to become a reality in the next few years. The collaboration between ESO and industry aims at achieving the best possible results whilst at the same time maintaining the costs affordable. To select the most suitable suppliers to perform ESO’s projects, procurement rules and regulations and relevant policies are established and followed on the principles of public procurement, non-discrimination, transparency, accountability, fairness, economy and efficiency. The ESO financial rules are also part of the framework and they establish that the tendering process must be competitive where possible and carried out within the ESO Member States. Only in exceptional cases are calls for tender, price inquiries and preliminary inquiries addressed at companies based in non-ESO Member States. The potential participants in the competitive process are usually chosen based on ESO’s supplier database, the staff members’ knowledge and information provided by the Industrial Liaison Officers, but are also selected based on the interest expressed by themselves towards ESO. At the end of the procedure a contract is awarded to the lowest priced bidder that is technically and managerially compliant.
