NASA’s Clean Room: Last Stop for New Hubble Hardware
source: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/servicing/series/cleanroom.html
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- TheRealEdwin
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A very clean room.
Astronauts will travel to the Hubble Space Telescope this summer, installing new instruments and other components during Servicing Mission 4. But before these components are cleared for launch, they go through one final checkup in the world’s largest clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
...all these features afford the Goddard clean room a Class-10,000 rating. That means any cubic foot of air in the clean room has no more than 10,000 particles floating around in it larger than 0.5 microns.
How small it that? A micron is one-millionth of a meter, and typical “outside” air has millions of such particles. (A human hair is between 20 and 200 microns wide.) If an inch ballooned to the size of the Empire State Building, a 0.5-micron bit of dust would still be smaller than a penny on the sidewalk.
Astronauts will travel to the Hubble Space Telescope this summer, installing new instruments and other components during Servicing Mission 4. But before these components are cleared for launch, they go through one final checkup in the world’s largest clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
...all these features afford the Goddard clean room a Class-10,000 rating. That means any cubic foot of air in the clean room has no more than 10,000 particles floating around in it larger than 0.5 microns.
How small it that? A micron is one-millionth of a meter, and typical “outside” air has millions of such particles. (A human hair is between 20 and 200 microns wide.) If an inch ballooned to the size of the Empire State Building, a 0.5-micron bit of dust would still be smaller than a penny on the sidewalk.
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