MPC staff were recently notified that a power outage has been scheduled for the primary CfA datacenter at Cambridge Discovery Park (CDP), which hosts most MPC computer systems. MPC systems will begin shutting down no earlier than 19:00 UTC (3 PM US Eastern time) on Thursday, 2025 September 11, and the downtime is expected to last at least four hours (i.e. until no earlier than 23:00 UTC).
This power outage is needed to conduct important electrical maintenance of the CDP datacenter, and cannot be rescheduled. During this power outage, we intend that the MPC's website and observation receipt servers will remain operational, but that data access APIs and data processing pipelines will be unavailable. As such, any data received during that period will not be processed until the end of the maintenance period. SQL data replication will also pause for the duration of the downtime. The MPC helpdesk will still be available.
An additional power outage, necessary to complete the electrical work, has been tentatively scheduled for Saturday, 2025 September 27. This may result in similar disruptions to MPC services. However, MPC staff have been developing the physical and technical infrastructure needed to temporarily relocate MPC's operations to an alternate datacenter, using a combination of newly-purchased hardware, virtualization technologies, and cloud services. We are cautiously optimistic that it will be ready in time for this second outage, in which case the effect on MPC operations will be less significant.
We will send out another update on this event and the expected availability of MPC systems once its scheduling is finalized. If you have any questions, please file a ticket with the MPC Helpdesk.
The Minor Planet Center (MPC) is the single worldwide location for receipt and distribution of positional measurements of minor planets, comets and outer irregular natural satellites of the major planets. The MPC is responsible for the identification, designation and orbit computation for all of these objects. This involves maintaining the master files of observations and orbits, keeping track of the discoverer of each object, and announcing discoveries to the rest of the world via electronic circulars and an extensive website. The MPC operates at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, under the auspices of Division F of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
All of the MPC's operating funds come from a NASA Near-Earth Object Observations program grant. Much of the computer equipment that the MPC uses was provided by the Tamkin Foundation.