Jack, I don’t know for sure, but, having worked in clean rooms myself, I can take a stab at answering your question.

Eyelashes are quite big, heavy particles. They may fall off, but they won’t travel far. In a typical clean room, filtered air enters through vents in the ceiling and leaves through vents at floor level (some clean rooms actually have the exit vents in the floor), making the overall flow of air downwards. This reduces the ability of particles of any sort to travel very far. Even so, the biggest risk is small particles (e.g. of skin or dirt or bacteria or mucus); this is because they are hardest to notice and they can travel farther in air (a human body emits a lot of heat and creates quite large convection currents).

Covering most of the operators’ skin and all of their hair mitigates the risk. Eyelashes are (I’m guessing here) a relatively trivial risk by comparison.

- Jack

My bad! Well that’s 2 stars for you.

IR covers a really large wavelength range. Spitzer has instruments going from about 3.6 microns up to 170 microns, while Herschel’s instruments are focussed more on the sub-mm regime; the full wavelength range goes from 60 to 700 microns.

Incidentally, Herschel is the only of those ESA missions that I have heard of, and I don’t work in the infrared… .

[TMB]

Thanks for the response. I’m just used to watching the onboard cameras on shuttle missions that seem to show violent vibrations on liftoff.

Was just wondering how it’s stabilized aboard ANY craft.

Thanks again.

Eddie