Scientists are "working to assess the extent of the damage, but it is severe."

Bad Flood

A burst water pipe has wreaked havoc on data sent by a pair of NASA spacecraft — the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) — which are tens of thousands and hundreds of miles away from Earth, respectively.

And no, the four-inch cooling water line wasn't attached to either of them when it burst on November 26. The incident occurred at the SDO Joint Science Operations Center (JSOC) at Stanford University in California, according to a recent update, forcing scientists to shut down the processing of data from numerous SDO and IRIS scientific instruments.

"The Stanford JSOC team is working to assess the extent of the damage, but it is severe," the update reads. "Science data processing" will "be down for an extended length of time."

But there's a silver lining. Since the "data capture systems for all three instruments remain functional," no incoming data is "expected to be lost."

Pied Piper

The pipe, which sends cooling water through a server room at Stanford, burst and "caused major flooding" as well as "extensive water damage," according to the JSOC team.

"At this point, it is unclear how long it will take to assess the damage, repair the equipment, and complete recovery," reads an FAQ appended to the update. "We do know that the damage is extensive and [repairs] will not be completed until 2025."

The IRIS spacecraft launched in June 2013 and has been helping scientists study the flow of plasma into the Sun's corona and heliosphere using a high-frame-rate UV imaging spectrometer.

The SDO, which launched in 2010, was designed to study how solar activity causes space weather, the conditions caused by the Sun releasing a barrage of charged particles streaming across the solar system.

Fortunately, while the flood will greatly delay data processing, the spacecraft are still able to beam data back home as expected.

Besides, it's also a lot easier to address a burst water pipe in a server room back on Earth than it is to repair a spacecraft thousands of miles away.

More on solar spacecraft: Spacecraft Takes Close Up Video of the Sun, Revealing Otherworldly Hellscape


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