NASA solar mission data recovering after server room flood fiasco – The Register
They can put a man on the Moon – but back on Earth, a busted water pipe managed to knock out NASA’s solar mission data for months.Data from two NASA solar missions is becoming available again following an outage that began in November 2024.The affected missions are the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which was launched in 2010, and the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), launched in 2013.Both spacecraft have collected vast amounts of solar data over the years. However, new and historical data from the missions became unavailable in November after a broken pipe caused significant flooding of the building that houses the Joint Science Operations Center (JSOC). Data from two of SDO’s instruments is processed at JSOC, as is data from IRIS.The vehicles continued to collect and downlink data during the outage, but researchers were unable to access it.Repairs at Stanford University’s JSOC are ongoing. In a January update, the SDO team noted, “Several pieces of electronics are delayed by the dreaded supply-chain issues we all thought were finally behind us.”An update this week from NASA confirmed that near real-time data from the two affected SDO imaging instruments has been resuming every 15 minutes since early January. Most other SDO data processing has also restarted, with more data becoming available as system repairs progress. Meanwhile, all IRIS data during the outage period is now available.There is still work to do; two data partitions must be restored from tape, a process the JSOC team warned would take several months. As of the end of January, JSOC estimated that five percent of the data before December 23, 2023, wouldn’t be available until the restoration was complete.Data is coming back online, and alternative archive locations are available, but the prolonged outage was far from ideal. For an agency that prides itself on spacecraft redundancy, having several ground systems taken out by a break in a four-inch chilled water pipe in a server room is not a good look, even if no incoming data was lost during the outage.The incident does, however, serve to highlight the importance of disaster recovery planning. According to JSOC, about 20 percent of the building’s database and data servers were damaged in the incident, along with disk drives and UPS units. The floor was submerged in some places by “a few inches” of water, although most equipment was raised above floor level.Something for the next budget meeting when some bean counter gripes about costs. ®Send us newsThe Register Biting the hand that feeds IT
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Source: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/07/nasa_solar_mission_data_recovering/
