PORTLAND, Maine — The Gorham-based manufacturer Mega Industries announced it has won a $2.6 million contract to provide components for a particle accelerator at Michigan State University that aims to learn more about rare types of atoms.
The company engineers and manufactures components for the military and aviation as well as particle accelerators and fusion research at a 40,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in the Gorham Industrial Park and has about 50 employees.
The latest contract comes from a project estimated to cost more than $750 million dollars, with funding from the nuclear physics arm of the U.S. Department of Energy. It would be the largest nuclear research project in the United States and is planned for completion in 2022.
The facility aims to study rare isotopes, which have varying numbers of neutrons and therefore different masses than the most common forms of a certain atom. It plans to create and study short-lived isotopes that are no longer found on Earth.
The university says on its website the research of those rare isotopes will help it study nuclear structure and how certain elements are formed in stars elsewhere in the universe.
Peter Mathews, the company’s CEO, said in a news release that the award was based on a competitive bidding process and it opens the door for possible future contracts with the university’s Facility for Rare Isotope Research.