No passengers allowed in the SHM

One aspect to be taken care during the "abnormally quiet" period of the CryoSat-2 (CS-2) storage is that no little animals will visit or take the Space Head Module (SHM) as a natural "home''. This could have dramatic consequences.

Insects and or small rodents like mice are the best candidates as we observed them several time at the MIK.


Russians are taking the issue very seriously. For the fairing part

• the cones on the legs of the jig normally prevent small rodents to climb up the hardware.

• As a second precaution, a plastic foil under the fairing has been installed this morning. This will also help for preventing conventional contamination.
  

As far the SHM (where CS-2 is encapsulated) is concerned, it is tight sealed on the bottom side with large filtering areas enabling air circulation.
Note: the hole for connectors (bottom side middle of the picture) is also sealed from the inside.


The ideal solution would be to use one (or two) good old tomcat(s) from the vicinity (there are some), but as you can imagine they are not allowed in clean or equivalent integration halls!