When F. Michael Hemmer of Brookhaven National Labs in Upton, New York called, he didn't think that ESS would be able to recover his data, since the hard disk had been overwritten with another operating system.
This did not phase the Engineers at ESS, who quickly recovered all of the data needed using a procedure specifically developed for this type of problem.
Later it was revealed that this data was mission-critical in the operation of the World's largest particle accelerator. This particle accelerator is powered by liquid heilium-cooled, superconducting magnets capable of accelerating and colliding gold ions at nearly the speed of light. This Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is one of the largest physics facilities in the world with a total circumference of 2.4 miles (below).
Thanks to ESS, the Nobel-prize winning researchers of this facility can continue their experiments to find evidence of both expected scientific landmarks and new phenomena that are predicted but not yet observed.
In particular, these scientists are searching for evidence of a new phase of nuclear matter called quark-gluon plasma, which physicists believe last existed at the beginning of the universe.
