The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been staring on the Sun for over a decade, amassing treasured information about our host star and maintaining a tally of its violent flareups. NASA’s shut watch of the Sun is on maintain for now after a busted water pipe flooded the observatory’s information assortment heart, damaging {the electrical} tools that processes details about the star.
A cooling water line burst on the Joint Science Operations Center (JSOC), the science information processing facility at Stanford which homes the servers that retailer information from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) and the Atmospheric Imaging Array (AIA) devices for NASA’s SDO, in addition to the Sun observing satellite tv for pc, Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), the house company introduced final week. “Several inches of water had been within the JSOC room,” an announcement on SDO’s web site learn. “As of this morning it seems the flooding has been drained however issues are nonetheless moist and no less than one leak onto digital tools continued.
The facility is at present offline whereas JSOC works on fixing it, the middle added in an replace. “At this level, it’s unclear how lengthy it’ll take to evaluate the injury, restore the tools, and full restoration,” JSOC added. “We do know that the injury is intensive and [repairs] won’t be accomplished till 2025.”
During that point, the ability shall be unable to course of new information collected past November 26. Thankfully, the info collected previous to the flooding has not been misplaced, and can stay saved till the injury to the servers has been repaired.
“Science information processing for HMI, AIA, and IRIS shall be down for an prolonged size of time, as will entry to the archived information at JSOC,” the ability wrote in an announcement. The devices proceed to operate usually, and are being monitored by the Instrument Operations Center on the Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Lab.
NASA’s photo voltaic observatory helps scientists get a greater understanding of the Sun’s affect on Earth and near-Earth house by monitoring how the star adjustments over time. It’s not excellent for scientists to not be capable to obtain information from SDO for the following whereas, particularly because the Sun is in its most lively part. Earlier in October, NASA confirmed that the Sun is in photo voltaic most, a interval of elevated photo voltaic exercise that usually impacts Earth.
NASA has been utilizing SDO to watch the Sun and observe incoming photo voltaic storms. In May, Earth was hit by the most important geomagnetic storm in twenty years after the Sun flung a slew of charged particles in direction of our planet. SDO captured photos of highly effective photo voltaic flares erupting from the Sun forward of the storm, which had been the primary warning indicators of what was to return.
As the Sun continues its erratic habits, observations of our host star are quickly on pause till the photo voltaic observatory’s ground-based servers get better from flood injury.
