Why when working on something like satellites, space rovers etc does everyone have to wear gear as if working with diseased patients?
In: Engineering
The equipment used can be very sensitive to things like dust or dirt. Getting some dust in a connector, bearing or on some equipment can prevent them from working properly. Best case it will get discovered before launch and you have to disassemble the craft, clean it and then reassemble it costing valuable money and time. Especially for interplanetary crafts that have tight windows when the planets alligns for a launch this can cause the project to be canceled. In the worst case it will not be discovered before launch and cause a failure which can not be fixed after launch.
But maybe more importantly we try a lot to prevent other planets and moons from getting contaminated with our lifeforms. If you get some bacteria on Mars for instance it might be able to thrive on the planet. If we then later find signs of life on Mars we do not know if it came frome Earth on a probe or if it came naturally somehow. And if there were already life on Mars it could have gotten eradicated by the bacteria from Earth that we brought. There was an issue for Apollo 12 when they visited the site of an earlier rover mission and retrieved samples containing Earth bacteria, however because the Apollo 12 itself was not free of germs they do not know if the bacteria came from the rover or the spacecraft. It is highly unlikely but it might also have been on the Moon to start with and we have no way of knowing.
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