NSSDC and SSDOO Quietly Ring in the New Century

The Space Science Data Operations Office (including NSSDC) shut down its computers and networks over the Y2K weekend as a general information technology (IT) security precaution. There were no complaints that computers were unavailable. This lack of complaints suggests that NSSDC's and SSDOO's research and other customers were busy celebrating the arrival of the new millennium.

Monday morning, January 3, 2000, equipment was powered up and has operated successfully in the new year. The Y2K validation, verification, and testing proved worthwhile, and for the large part, systems and software have been Y2K-compliant. NSSDC has experienced a couple of very minor Y2K problems with little to no impact. For example, a standard Perl date function returned the year to be 100 instead of 2000. The Perl script was easily fixed by calling a different Perl function.

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