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From: masticol@athos.rutgers.edu (Steve Masticola)
Newsgroups: sci.space,sci.space.shuttle
Subject: Re: space news from Jan 7 AW&ST
Keywords: Astro-1 filter failures
Message-ID: <Feb.25.10.28.36.1991.2849@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 25 Feb 91 15:28:37 GMT
References: <1991Feb25.013310.8439@zoo.toronto.edu>
Followup-To: sci.space
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 21

Henry Spencer writes:

> Postmortem on the Dedicated Display Units that failed aboard Astro-1
> shows identical failures, tentatively the result of debris clogging
> heat sinks.  The debris is still being analyzed but "...it looked
> like it consisted of blue lint, human hair of several different colors,
> several colors of paint chips, a piece of food that looked like a
> piece of a peanut, and some clear bits, probably of glass and plastic".

Slobs.

Oh, well. Given that this is probably going to happen again, is there
a reasonable way to instrument the heat sinks so that they can detect
clogging, and design them so that they can be cleaned in space? Even a
small temperature or airflow sensor would be adequate instrumentation,
if the heat sinks were designed for maintenance in flight. 

I thought that the ability to maintain equipment was supposed to be
one of the purposes of having a human presence in space.

- Steve (masticol@cs.rutgers.edu)