The Bacteriology of "Clean Rooms": Final Report

The immediate mission of the Planetary Quarantine Office is to assure sterility of space hardware impacting on the planet Mars. To accomplish this task, technical and administrative procedures must be decided upon and implemented on a tight schedule, well in advance of the actual mission. Decisions have thus already been made on the basis of available knowledge, often without the advantage of having that knowledge confirmed by repetition and careful analysis. In this regard many of the data reported herein have been disseminated far in advance of this document. Indeed, the chapter on evaluation of a laminar flow room resulted from a decision based, in part, on the preliminary data from the comparison of conventional clean room facilities. As such, this document provides no new or startling information. Instead it is hoped that it will provide some measure of comfort to the Planetary Quarantine Office in that the data seem to confirm the early indications and empirical judgments and, thus, vindicate the decisions which have been made thus far on subjects related to this research.