Spacecraft Bioburden Sterilization

One of the concrete environmental obligations of spaceflight is planetary protection: keeping Earth microbes off other worlds so future life-detection missions aren't chasing a false positive we brought ourselves. This simulator renders a swatch of spacecraft hardware seeded with a real spore population and puts it through a dry-heat bake-out, exactly as assembly-facility sterilization does before launch. Each spore dies according to first-order D-value/z-value thermal kinetics — raise the chamber temperature and the population collapses exponentially faster; the live readouts track exposure time, the current D-value, remaining bioburden, cumulative log-reduction, and an estimated time to reach a representative planetary-protection limit.