Work Area Characterization to Control Product Cleanliness

A particulate contamination characterization program was initiated to develop operational profiles for the Perkin-Elmer clean room facility being used to assemble and verify the NASA Hubble Space Telescope. The primary objective of this program was to develop an analytical model to provide obscuration prediction data for hardware exposed to typical clean room environments. A performance profile of the work area was derived from real-time experimental data and related the effectiveness of the facility design to operational manpower and activity loading. The three-dimensional and time dynamics of this clean room environment were both considered in the analysis of the test data and suggest areas for further study that will provide additional guidelines for the design of large clean room facilities for future aerospace applications.