GONG/BB connectivity issues

On 19 July, GONG/Big Bear experienced issues with connecting to the network. Rebooting bbgong workstation did not fix the issue. The team reached out to the local support team asking them to investigate.

GONG Duty Cycle

On November 28, 2022, the volcanic eruption shut down the NSF's GONG station at Mauna Loa, Hawai'i. Since then, GONG operated as 5-station network. It was designed as 6-station network because of helioseismology requirements of high duty cycle (fraction of 24-hour day with solar observations). The plot shows the duty cycle through April 2025. GONG still meets the helioseismology requirements, but one can clearly see a drop in the duty cycle at the end of 2022 from about 95% to 85-90%. The plan is to restart GONG station at Mauna Loa by the end of this year, after the road access and the electric power are restored.

NISP data server

Work has started on replacing current Isilon data server by new Ceph cluster. Hardware for a development (sandbox) server has arrived (see photo), and it will be installed later this year. Factoring in redundancy and object storage overhead, the usable capacity in the Ceph production cluster will be around 1.5PB. In comparison, the usable storage capacity of the existing Isilon cluster is about 1.0PB of which about 913TB is currently used.

GONG data processing update

 

Processing of the network-merged daily velocity and magnetogram images, p-mode-coefficient time series, and ring-diagram analysis products for GONG month 304, and the p-mode frequency data products for central GONG month 303 is completed and the data products are now available. 

Mauna Loa Access Road

The Central Federal Lands Highway Division of the Federal Highway Administration has updated its "Request for Qualifications (RFQ)" on sam.gov with new due date 9 July 2025. That means that the schedule for Mauna Loa Access road is delayed by about a month with road completion estimated in Nov 2025. 

 

Large prominence eruption on 5 July 2025

See a large prominence at the North-West limb of the Sun rising and erupting as observed by GONG stations at Learmonth, Australia and Teide, Canary Islands on 5 July 2025, between 03:00:42 UT and 11:06:11 UT.

NISP group continues working on the GONG refurbishment project.

NISP Data Center, scientists, and engineers are currently vetting another new EVT (Emergent Vision Technologies) GONG camera at one of the NISP engineering sites in Boulder, Colorado. Five of the EVT cameras have already replaced old SMD (Silicon Mountain Design company) cameras at five sites of the GONG network. We have two more EVT cameras to vet. The two cameras and the one being currently tested, will upgrade the engineering sites.