The Life, Physical Sciences and Life Support Laboratory's 35 sq. m ‘ISO Class 1’ clean room provides an ultra-clean environment, suitable for working on flight hardware requiring a very high level of cleanliness and sterilisation, such as instruments for Europe’s 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions.
The clean room is fitted with a dry heat steriliser, ultra-clean gas lines, exhaust line and IT infrastructure, with all its air passing through a two-stage filtering system.
The chamber’s cleanliness is such that it contains less than 10 smoke-sized particles per cubic metre; an equivalent sample of the outside air could well contain millions.