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Language: en

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TOM SCOTT: I got an email that said:

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"Do you want to come and see our satellite
clean room"?

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Yes. Yes I do.

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(How do you get into this thing?)

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WOUTER WEGGELAAR: This is the clean room area.

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We have a working environment here for the
people to work clean.

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Basically this is a box in a box.

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And on the roof we have some filters

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and also in the walls we have ventilation

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so the air is always going downwards

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and this is also a laminar flow cleanroom

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so the air is also going straight down

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instead of in vortexes.

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TS: This is Innovative Space Logistics in
the Netherlands.

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Originally a spinoff from TU Delft's engineering
department,

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they now launch Cubesats, like this one --

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okay, it's a model, that's why I'm allowed
to touch it --

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but they launch satellites like this into
actual space.

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I mean, the rockets go up from all over the
world,

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but some of the satellites that are on board?
Put together right here.

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WW: Well, the cage behind me is a customs
area

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where we have the satellites enter the clean
room

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but not the Netherlands

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and that's for export reasons.

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Technically we're exporting these satellites
to a country

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which is the country of launch

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but they are exporting to space

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and space doesn't have a box on the forms!

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TS: There are international standards for
cleanrooms.

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They go from ISO 9, which is just normal air,

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to ISO 1. Now this room is only ISO 7,

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which doesn't sound very impressive until
you realise it's a log scale:

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each level of that standard requires a tenth
of the dust and particulates.

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So this room guarantees less than 1% of the
dust outside it.

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WW: So the main contamination source --

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and that's also why I'm wearing all of this
--

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is particles that are released from our own
bodies.

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Dead skin cells, hairs. If you smoke, even
air you exhale.

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Beard, in my case, because I have a beard
mask on.

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Cardboard, paper, velcro --

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basically stuff that can hold particles and
release it when you don't want to.

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TS: And it's not just the dust particles that
you can see.

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Those are actually pretty easy.

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Cleanrooms also have to remove microparticles,

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things smaller than a bacterium.

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You don't have to get them all,

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but you do have to get most of them.

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WW: This is a small communications satellite
called Nayif-1.

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And this satellite will be a communication
experiment

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and also will be used in classrooms for teaching
about space.

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Schools can pick up the signals from this
satellite

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decode them in the classroom

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and teach about space, teach about radio.

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TS: In here, the worst-case scenario is contamination
on a camera lens,

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or a vacuum gyroscope that fails while it's
doing 10,000 RPM... in space.

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This down here is an actual satellite,

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it's headed for space later this year,

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and I've got to stand back from it,

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because if I lean over, dust from me,

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or spittle from my mouth, could fall down.

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Won't break anything right now,

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but in zero-gravity, in vacuum,

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with direct solar radiation shining down on
it?

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You can't exactly call a breakdown service
to fix your satellite.

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So for safety's sake, it's kept very, very
clean.

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But those ISO 1 cleanrooms? They're for very
different missions.

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WW: ISO 1 cleanrooms is very clean,

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and basically for Mars missions, or missions
to the moon,

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where we do not want to contaminate the surface
of a planet or a body that we go to.

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TS: Are you sending anything to Mars any time
soon?

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WW: Not at the moment, it's not planned

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but maybe in the future we will send something
to Mars! You never know.

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