CFHT has a new facility, a class 100 clean room. This gives CFHT personnel the ability to work on camera dewars, CCDs, and other sensitive items in a clean, static-free, environmentally controlled area.
The clean room has been set up in room 71, Dan Sabin's old office. A static conductive floor was installed. Then a 12' x 16' (approximately 4 x 5 meters) modular clean room was put up in the back of the room Inside this clean room are a couple of workbenches, a laminar flow bench, and some storage for CCDs, etc. The anteroom (the rest of the former office) has storage, a workbench and vacuum pump.
This clean room has highly filtered air blown into it to keep a positive pressure inside, which keeps dirt out of the clean room. A class 100 clean room means that there are 100 or fewer particles per cubic foot of air (approximately 3400 particles m-3). In an ordinary office, there are about 30,000 particles per ft3 (100,000 m-3). In an office where someone smokes, there is about 500,000 particles ft-3 (1.5 million m-3). All of this dirt is potentially harmful to a sensitive CCD. In an attempt to prevent ruining an expensive device by working on it in a dirty environment, CFHT install this clean room.
In order to keep the particle count as low as possible, anyone entering the anteroom is to put on booties over their shoes and step on sticky floor mats just outside and inside the door. When entering the clean room, they put on a "bunny suit", face mask, safety glasses, a cap, and gloves. This attire will keep most of the particles on everyday clothing from coming off and polluting the clean room. We have done some tests with a particle counter on clothing and that produced a dramatic illustration of just how dirty humans are! So, please, observe the signs posted on the door into the anteroom and on the door into the clean room.