Cleaning is not really the loveliest of chores on the planet. It works well for your face or your house but if you have to clean your electronics, it is quite a mess because you can not afford to get a drop of water in there. Washing a car is fine but when the vehicle goes as humungous as an airplane, that too with fragile components, the task is multiplied many folds. Similar efforts go towards cleaning equipment as massive as the Very Large Telescope (VLT) operated by the European Southern Observatory.
Source: ESO
Located at the Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, the VLT is a combination of four individual telescopes, namely Antu, Kueyen, Melipal, and Yepun. Cleaning the giant mirrors of these telescopes is quite a task, that too in the middle of a desert where there is absolutely no way to avoid dust.
Source: ESO
ESO officials say, “Every night the huge mirrors are exposed to the atmosphere while uncovered during observing sessions. They gradually accumulate dust and other pollutants that reduce their reflectivity, making them less effective at capturing faint light from the cosmos. So they are regularly removed from the telescope, taken down the mountain to the re-coating facility, cleaned and finally recoated with a thin and highly reflective new aluminium layer.”
The process requires removing the mirror and transferring it to a re-coating plant, and it can take up to eight days. The officials also say that it looks like a simple task, but it actually is quite a tense operation. Pretty cool, isn’t it?