Busted Water Pipe Halts NASA’s Solar Observations at the Worst Possible Time

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been staring at the Sun for over a decade, collecting precious data about our host star and keeping an eye on its violent flareups. NASA’s close watch of the Sun is on hold for now after a busted water pipe flooded the observatory’s data collection center, damaging the electrical equipment that processes information about the star.

A cooling water line burst at the Joint Science Operations Center (JSOC), the science data processing facility at Stanford which houses the servers that store data from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) and the Atmospheric Imaging Array (AIA) instruments for NASA’s SDO, as well as the Sun observing satellite, Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), the space agency announced last week. “Several inches of water were in the JSOC room,” a statement on SDO’s website read. “As of this morning it appears the flooding has been drained but things are still wet and at least one leak onto electronic equipment continued.

The facility is currently offline while JSOC works on fixing it, the center added in an update. “At this point, it is unclear how long it will take to assess the damage, repair the equipment, and complete recovery,” JSOC added. “We do know that the damage is extensive and [repairs] will not be completed until 2025.”

During that time, the facility will be unable to process new data collected beyond November 26. Thankfully, the data collected prior to the flooding has not been lost, and will remain stored until the damage to the servers has been repaired.

“Science data processing for HMI, AIA, and IRIS will be down for an extended length of time, as will access to the archived data at JSOC,” the facility wrote in a statement. The instruments continue to function normally, and are being monitored by the Instrument Operations Center at the Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Lab.

NASA’s solar observatory helps scientists get a better understanding of the Sun’s influence on Earth and near-Earth space by monitoring how the star changes over time. It’s not ideal for scientists to not be able to receive data from SDO for the next while, especially since the Sun is in its most active phase. Earlier in October, NASA confirmed that the Sun is in solar maximum, a period of increased solar activity that often affects Earth.

NASA has been using SDO to monitor the Sun and track incoming solar storms. In May, Earth was hit by the largest geomagnetic storm in two decades after the Sun flung a slew of charged particles towards our planet. SDO captured images of powerful solar flares erupting from the Sun ahead of the storm, which were the first warning signs of what was to come.

As the Sun continues its erratic behavior, observations of our host star are temporarily on pause until the solar observatory’s ground-based servers recover from flood damage.