Are you under the impression that their website is hosted on-premises? This ain't the early 90s

As an ex-JPLer, it would not have surprised me for this to be the case even in the early 2010s.

It looks down, yes the marketing website is fine, but the scientific tools seem to be down. It would be reasonable that they are locally hosted, like close to the sensors.

Well, most of the actual sensors are in space ;) but yes, telemetry collected via the DSN gets routed through JPL first.

Also, in addition to the SSD website linked upthread, the NAIF site [0] (where the SPICE library and kernels can be downloaded) also seems to be down. It would not surprise me in any way if some of these facilities are hosted on-prem and are in a power-down state due to the fires.

(Speaking of the DSN, their website [1] is also down.)

[0] https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit.html

[1] https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/

You’re correct. The lab management sent out a message to this effect mid-day Wednesday. Many public-facing servers were taken down purposely due to the fires. Part of the lab HPC was also powered down, not sure what its status is now. The head nodes were up earlier today.

There are generators for other critical servers, and in particular the DSN operations have been moved temporarily to another location so they could continue.

> There are generators for other critical servers, and in particular the DSN operations have been moved temporarily to another location so they could continue.

That's really good to hear. The DSN is a really, really important asset (not that everything else at JPL isn't, but!), so I'm glad they're not totally coupled to the physical JPL location.

Fair, but NASA facilities would be one of the organizations I would personally expect there to be an exception. They have all sorts of facilities where on-premise servers and capacity will be a lot better than some remote cloud offering.

I don't expect a lot of crossover between web dev and space exploration.

(As an ex-JPLer,) you would be very surprised how many internal tools this decade have been web-stack. Flight systems are one thing, but you need plenty of ground systems to support the effective use of assets in flight, and there's no reason to avoid one of the biggest UI platforms out there.

That makes a lot of sense! Thanks for pointing that out.

The Horizons website at that domain [0] (which was on HN recently) seems to be down for me as well. FWIW, that's not "the" JPL website though, that's just one of many JPL-hosted websites.

[0] https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/

wat

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/