Seismic analysis of the 4-meter telescope SST-GATE for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) project aims to create a next generation Very High Energy (VHE)γ-ray telescope array, devoted to the observation in a wide band of energy, from a few tens of GeV to more than 100 TeV. Two sites are foreseen to view the whole sky, with the main one in the Southern Hemisphere where about 100 telescopes of three different classes, related to the specific energy region to be investigated, will be installed. Among these, the Small Size class of Telescopes, SSTs, are 4-meter telescopes and are devoted to the highest energy region, from 1 TeV to beyond 100 TeV. Some of these sites considered for CTA exhibit strong seismic constraints. At the Observatoire de Paris, we have designed a prototype of a Small Size Telescope named SST-GATE, based on the dual-mirror Schwarzschild-Couder optical formula, which was never before implemented in the design of a Cherenkov telescope. The integration of this telescope on the site of the Observatoire de Paris is currently in progress. Technical solutions exist in the literature to protect structures from dynamic loads caused by earthquakes without increasing the mass and cost of the structure. This paper presents a state of the art of these techniques by keeping in mind that the operational performance of the telescope should not be compromised. The preliminary seismic analysis of SSTGATE performed by the finite element method is described before.