Update on SuperK Detector Failure 187
This note came in from Director Totsuka to the press and other scientists. Hemos and I felt it deserved more than just a regular SlashBack reference, as we feel that this is an important project. (I belive this comes form a translation from japanese, so forgive the errors) this is an update to the original post on the Super-K malfunction.
As a director of the Kamioka Observatory, which owns and is responsible to operate and maintain the Super-Kamiokande detector, it is really sad that I have to announce the severe accident that occurred on November 12 and damaged the significant part of the detector. The cause and how to deal with the lo ss in future will be discussed by newly found committees. However, even before discussing with my colleagues of the Super-K and K2K collaborations, I have
decided to express my intension on behalf of the staff of the Kamioka Observatory.
We will rebuild the detector. There is no question. The strategy may be the following two steps, which will be proposed and discussed by my colleagues.
-
1. Quick restart of the K2K experiment.
- (1) We will clear the safety measures which may be suggested by the committees.
- (2) reduce the number density of the photomultiplier tubes by about a half.
- (3) use the existing resources.
- (4) resume the K2K experiment as soon as possible; the goal may be within one year.
- (1) Restore the full Super-Kamiokande detector armed with the state-of-the-art techniques.
- (2) The detector will be ready by the time of the commissioning of the JHF machine.
Best regards,
Yoji Totsuka
director, Kamioka Observatory
On behalf of the Kamioka Observatory staff
Boy, that clears that up. (Score:5, Insightful)
Still no formal explanation..This is beginning to sound an awful lot like, "Dad, I totalled the car..A telephone pole jumped infront of my car, and I couldn't swerve around it in time! Honest, Dad!!"
Something tells me these guys made a titanically stupid mistake, and they're afraid of letting the cat out of the bag before they have a chance to circle the wagons and defend their multi-million dollar "oops".. See, its kinda hard to rebuild the detector when your funds have been cut due to findings of gross negligence.
Again, I move we refer to it as the "Special K" detector from now on.
Cheers,
Re:Repair estimates top $30M (Score:2, Insightful)
War is immoral, and spending outrageous amounts of money on war is immoral, but it is even more immoral to ignore evil.
Hope THAT puts things into perspective.
Re:Boy, that clears that up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Gross negligence? Doubtful.
You don't get to spend that kind of money without at least pretending to account for possible problems. Thing is, no one expects the fscking detectors to implode like this....
Re:probably no single stupid mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlike, say, sending a probe all the way to Mars then having it burn up because two teams used different measurement units and forgot to convert them?
History is full of examples of very gifted and smart people making very simple but catastrophic mistakes, or totally failing to anticipate the consequences of their actions, this looks like another of them. At least nobody died in this one!
No matter how hard we (humanity) tries, things will go wrong, given the complexity of todays world it is probably unavoidable. But it is important that we at least learn.. And that is the good thing about this article, they are going to find the 'what' and 'why', and (if I read it correctly) make sure it does not happen again.