Some data from NASA’s SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) and IRIS (Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph) missions is temporarily unavailable because of flooding in the building that houses the missions’ data center at Stanford University. Both spacecraft remain healthy and are otherwise operating normally.
On Tuesday, Nov. 26, a broken pipe caused major flooding in the building that houses the Joint Science Operations Center, which processes and distributes data from two of SDO’s instruments and processes IRIS data. New data and some historical data from the affected instruments will be unavailable until repairs are complete, currently estimated for the first quarter of 2025. During the outage, both spacecraft continue to collect and downlink data. The mission teams expect this data to be available once repairs to the data center are complete.
The outage includes current and historical data for SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly and Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager instruments, which provide a constant eye on the Sun in multiple wavelengths of light. Some historical data from these instruments through Nov. 26 is available from alternative sources outlined on the Joint Science Operations Center website.
The outage also includes current data from the IRIS mission, which observes how solar material moves, gathers energy, and heats up as it travels through the Sun’s lower atmosphere. Historical processed data from this mission through Nov. 22 continues to be accessible from the IRIS archive at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Lab.
Data from SDO’s Extreme ultraviolet Variability Experiment instrument is unaffected and remains available from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
For more information, status updates on repairs, and alternate routes to access historical mission data, please visit the Joint Science Operations Center website.
Media Contact: Sarah Frazier