12th Workshop on Accelerator Operations

When the pandemic hit Europe in spring 2020, the GSI/FAIR accelerator facilities were in the middle of a user beam time and after the first external user groups affected by the travel ban had to cancel their participation, we were faced with the decision to cancel the beam time as well. However, some local research groups organised a way to continue their experiments on their own, in exchange for sleep. Additionally there were a lot of proposed accelerator related studies that had not yet been conducted. So we made the main control room the safest place to be during the pandemic and just kept going. Despite many challenges, it eventually worked out so well that we scheduled another beam time period for first half of 2021, right into the 3rd wave of the pandemic. But this time we were prepared for anything ... right?