Cleanrooms: Not for Prostate Exams

July 12, 2008

Within a few minutes of posting this picture up on Facebook, which of the following am I told?

1. "nice SARS biosuit"
2. "are you delivering a radioactive baby?"
3. "you look like you're about to inappropriately probe someone"
4. "I'm having a little trouble with my prostate..."
5. all of the above

The answer, of course, is all of the above -- and I call these people my friends!

The photo isn't from a prostate examination room, but rather from a trip video producer Jorge Ribas and I took to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. We swung by last week to check out the progress a new probe being sent to the moon. (Stay tuned to Discovery Space for some video on that.)

It's called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and, at $460+ million for the whole shebang, it's a sensitive and delicate robot that no one wants to screw up.

That's where the funny costume, also called a bunny suit, comes in. It safely contains most of your dead skin cells, stray hairs, and the occasional rogue booger.

To understand why people wear these around spacecraft, picture this situation: You have a chance to be photographed with *the* icon of your lifetime -- let's say Dee Snider of Twisted Sister -- and you can only pick one disposable camera. For your moment of glory with Dee, would you select the camera buried in that hot, dusty, oily, damp nook under your car seat, or one that's neatly sealed in plastic inside your climate-controlled home?

Exactly.

Cleanrooms have some really cool features, the most important being filtered air. LRO's main cleanroom, for example, is rated as a class-10,000. What the heck does that mean? It's got air about 4,000 times less dirty than the air outdoors! (The technical stuff: class-10,000 cleanrooms are contaminated with 10,000 or fewer particles 0.0005 mm in size per cubic foot of air.)

Inside the main cleanroom, there are even more and tidier rooms that are layered sort of like an onion. Within the class-10,000 room is a class-1,000 room, and within that is a class-100 room -- and that's where LRO is worked on by spacecraft engineers.

All of the tools are specially designed not to flake, chip, or rub away to keep the spacecraft a clean as possible. Even the paper is soaked with latex to prevent wood fibers from going all over the place during scribbling (astronauts also use this stuff).

Cleanrooms are also climate-controlled because those blasted bunny suits get kind of hot, especially the Tyvek ones. Imagine wearing a suit made of those super-tough flat-rate envelopes you find at the post office (they're also made of Tyvek). Kinda stuffy.

These measures are all in place to protect your one-shot-only spacecraft from nasty contaminants, which can dirty sensitive equipment and even cause a short-circuit in space. On planetary and deep-space missions, cleanliness is especially important to make sure we don't contaminate other worlds with Earth's pesky microbes.

Back to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, though: If the moon was Dee Snider, then LRO is gearing up for quite a celebrity photo opportunity.

When it arrives at the moon, LRO's piggy-backing partner called the LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) will pop off from its mechanized mommy and then torpedo directly into the cratered surface. Ouch!

This self-destruction will throw up an impressive cloud of moon dust and -- keep your fingers crossed for a future moon base -- perhaps some buried water ice. (Read David Chandler's post at Next Generation about some new evidence for moon water.)

For an event like that, you definitely don't want a dirty lens -- or worse, a malfunctioning robotic cameraman.

Photos: Top-bottom - Discovery Space, U.S. Navy, DuPont, NASA

Comments

[Cleanroom Supplies]

Great Article...

[birdwatch]

Bunny, Dave