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NASA assembles its spacecraft and prepares them for launch in sterile clean rooms -- in part to protect any delicate instrumentation, and in part to make sure that the spacecraft don't bring Earth microbes along with them to their extraterrestrial destination. Tomorrow on Science Friday, we'll be talking with Catharine Conley, a NASA planetary protection officer, about what it means for Curiosity's Mars mission that one of the rover's drill bits may have been contaminated prior to launch.
Just how clean is a clean room? And how does a person prepare to do work in one? Check out this video tour of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory.
For more about what it takes to engineer an instrument destined for space, check out Flora's video that takes you behind the scenes of Honeybee Robotics, a lab that built parts for Curiosity.
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