Aerospace facilities utilize cleanrooms to control the bioburden and contamination of spacecraft. Planetary protection is necessary in order to detect cultivable and non-cultivable microorganisms, as well as to collect samples from outer space that may contain traces of life.
Additionally, new bioburden measurement methods can be produced from such research. According to NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection, “Reliable measurement of the bioburden, or abundance of microorganisms, on spacecraft, spacecraft components, and within cleanroom facilities is essential to understanding the potential for contaminating solar system bodies, and for demonstrating planetary protection compliance.”
“Large Scale Satellite Production: Every Particle Counts” — a look at the cleanroom facilities of Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. — ran in the May 2014 issue of Controlled Environments. Lockheed Martin’s clean facility services aerospace organizations such as NASA, the Department of Defense, and various commercial businesses. The satellites manufactured in this cleanroom must last years, even decades, so it’s important to monitor finite specifics such as the number of air particles per cubic foot or the relative humidity in the air.
See related article: Large Scale Satellite Production: Every Particle Counts — http://www.cemag.us/articles/2014/05/large-scale-satellite-production-every-particle-counts
After spacecraft are cleaned and sterilized, their packaging needs to protect them from recontamination from other parts of the spacecraft or the surrounding environment, such as the launch pad’s atmospheric conditions. During 2012 and 2013, mirrors manufactured by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. were shipped to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The mirrors were housed in custom shipping containers designed specifically for the multiple cross-country trips the mirrors made through eight U.S. states during manufacturing. Each container was hermetically sealed to handle atmospheric pressure changes caused by shipping from high elevations — such as the Ball facility in Boulder, Colo. — to locations at or near sea level — such as the Goddard facility in Greenbelt, Md.
The mirrors are being used on the James Webb Space Telescope (the successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope), which will be the most powerful space telescope ever built. The Webb Telescope is being built in Goddard’s Class 10,000 High Bay
cleanroom — often referred to as the world’s largest cleanroom, the High Bay can accommodate two space shuttle payloads simultaneously. The Webb Telescope will be launched in 2018. The NASA website hosts a “Webb Cam” that gives viewers a
real-time glance inside its cleanroom facility.
The Hubble Space Telescope also benefited from the High Bay cleanroom. New instruments and other components went through a thorough inspection in the clean facility before astronauts brought them to the telescope in 2009. The NASA website refers to the High Bay cleanroom being to the Hubble Telescope as “what hospital operating rooms are to patients,” noting that a fingerprint or even a single speck of dust could severely damage the telescope and its instruments. Once those components go into space, they cannot be cleaned, so it is vital that these contaminants are filtered out while in the cleanroom.
MaryBeth DiDonna is the Editor of Controlled Environments.
This Letter from the Editor appeared in the April 2015 issue of Controlled Environments.
