A chilled water pipe broke at the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Joint Science Operations Center (JSOC) server room in California.
The NASA-Stanford JSOC facility experienced "extensive water damage in the lab that houses the machines that process and distribute data from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) and Atmospheric Imaging Array (AIA) instruments and from the IRIS spacecraft," on November 26, 2024.
The outage, first reported by Space, is not believed to lead to any lost data, but simply impact the processing of that data. Data collected and processed on the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment has not been affected.
JSOC are still assessing the damage and cannot yet predict when services will return. "Several inches of water were in the JSOC room," the observatory said on November 27.
"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. An initial assessment is that the water affected many systems but did not provide a time for return to service."
SDO telemetry was previously impacted in October by a cable cut in New Mexico.
The IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) probe launched in June 2013, with HMI used to track oscillations and the magnetic field at the solar surface.
AIA is a four-telescope array, operating primarily in the extreme ultraviolet to track the Sun's corona - it is used to study solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), among other solar phenomena.
