Stanford Joint Center for Science Operations (JSOC)

History

2024: Data center flooded. Stored data from satellites destroyed

In early December 2024, it became known that the Stanford Joint Center for Scientific Operations (JSOC) broke through a 100-mm pipe of the server liquid cooling system. Some of the equipment has been destroyed.

In this center is the infrastructure used to process data from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the IRIS spectrograph - two NASA spacecraft that are used to observe the Sun. In particular, JSOC servers are responsible for processing information from two of the three scientific instruments aboard the SDO - the Helioseismic and Magnetic Visualizer (HMI), as well as the Atmospheric Imaging Lattice (AIA).

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It is said that due to the breakthrough of the pipe of the liquid cooling system, the level of water accumulated in the server rooms reached several centimeters. This has caused damage to many systems, with full recovery expected only in 2025. In general, experts call the damage "serious."

The processing of scientific data for HMI, AIA and IRIS will be suspended for an extended period of time, and access to archival information in JSOC is impossible, representatives of the organization said.

The SDO Space Observatory supplies about 42 TB of data each month. Although the information previously received as a result of the incident became unavailable, it was not completely lost. Data continues to accumulate on other server sites. So, information from the HMI device is stored in New Mexico. At the same time, the JSOC center has lost the ability to process data from SDO and IRIS in real time. This, as noted, creates certain difficulties in mission planning and space weather assessment.^[1]

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