Goddard Team Builds State-of-the-Art Facility

When it launches in 2014, NASA's new Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission will give scientists unprecedented insights into a little-understood physical process at the heart of all space weather. This process known as magnetic reconnection, sparks solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and other phenomena that can imperil Earth-orbiting spacecraft and even power grids on terra firma.

MMS requires a technologically advanced system of four identically equipped with spacecraft, which will fly in a tight, tetrahedral formation in Earth's magnetic environment – the magnetosphere — considered the best laboratory for studying magnetic reconnection. But the technological advances needed for MMS start long before the spacecraft are put together. Such advances are also found inside the brand new, 4,200-square-foot, environmentally friendly facility where engineers and scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will assemble and integrate the four spacecraft.

"Everyone can get very excited about the science MMS will gather. That's the cool part," says Dave Richardson, the Goddard facilities project manager who managed the facility's development. "But what people may not appreciate is that a lot of state-of-the-art technology went into enabling this mission."

The new high-tech facility resides in former warehouse space that a team of contractors and Goddard employees transformed into a "smart cleanroom." The air inside the space is relatively free of dust, aerosol particles, and chemical vapors — contaminants that can damage highly sensitive science instruments and hardware. To give perspective, outdoor air in a typical urban area contains one million particles per cubic foot. But the MMS cleanroom will have no more than 10,000 particles per cubic foot. These particles are small, too, measuring less than half a micron in diameter or about half the width of a human hair.

Although cleanrooms are ubiquitous in manufacturing and research facilities, the MMS facility stands out because it features state-of-the-art technology that not only filters air to remove contaminants but also performs this job with 30 percent less energy under low-load conditions.

"This effort will save NASA tens of thousands of dollars in electric bills each year," Richardson said, "and will pave the way for the Goddard team to revolutionize the way we run our facilities."

Source: NASA

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