NASA scientists said GLAST is now in a General Dynamics Corp. (NYSE:GD) clean room in Gilbert, Ariz. A clean room is an environment designed to have low levels of pollutants, such as chemical vapors, dust and airborne microscopic organisms.

Satellites such as GLAST are assembled and checked in clean rooms because their instruments are very sensitive to dust and can degrade when exposed to humidity.

GLAST, to be moved to its Florida launch pad later this year, is designed to detect X-rays and gamma rays in a range from thousands to hundreds of billions of times more energy than the light visible to the human eye.

NASA said the project is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and researchers in France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Sweden.