Scientists lost access to data collected by the SDO solar observatory. This happened due to flooding of the server room.
The SDO observatory was launched by NASA in 2010. It is located in geostationary orbit at an altitude of 36,000 kilometers above the Earth and studies the Sun and its activity. SDO is capable of observing in 12 wavebands ranging from extreme ultraviolet to visible light.
In 14 years of operation, SDO has experienced almost no serious problems. Ironically, the mission’s first notable failure occurred not in space, but on Earth. The fact is that all data collected by SDO was stored and processed on a server at Stanford University’s Joint Center for Science Operations. On November 26, it stopped working. The reason was flooding of the server room.
It’s not yet known how long the server has been repaired — but judging by the official announcement, we’re talking about quite a long time. All the while, scientists will be left without SDO data, which certainly can’t be called good news.
The fact is that the Sun is now at the peak of its activity and regularly produces powerful flares and coronal masses. And SDO observational data play a very important role in assessing this activity and better understanding what processes lead to its cyclic amplifications and attenuations. But for now, scientists will have to do without the machine’s data for a while.
Earlier we reported about a NASA telescope that went out of orbit due to solar activity.
