Life Support Systems: Environmental Monitoring

The Exploration Capabilities Life Support Systems project Environmental Monitoring (EM) systems task objectives are to develop and demonstrate onboard monitoring, detection, and analysis capabilities that will replace the state-of-the-art (SOA) need to frequently return air, water and microbial samples to Earth for ground-based laboratory analysis. This effort is addressing these challenges by adopting new analytical technologies and techniques that will allow for a modular EM system architecture that integrates multiple sensing modalities to address the monitoring needs of future deep-space exploration missions. Environmental monitoring includes monitoring of air quality, water quality, and microbial quality.

Efforts include:

Spacecraft Atmosphere Monitor (SAM) - Demonstrate a highly compact gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GCMS) technology on ISS, provide major constituent and trace gas monitoring capability with a long term instrument life. Develop a single compact instrument that is six times smaller (mass/volume) and consumes two times less power.

Mini Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (MiniTOCA) - Develop a smaller version of Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA). Reduce the mass, volume and consumable shelf life and maintain functionality to determine water portability for both crew drinking water and EVA. A novel UV technology and tunable laser spectrometer was developed for CO2 detection.

MinION: Technology for microbial monitoring of surfaces and water. This technology moves away from the culture-based approach to improve sample collection and provide real-time microbial monitoring. Work will validate the MinION generated bacterial and fungal identifications with the Oxford Nanopore technology chemistry, create a Bioinformatic and data analysis development, enable the testing of fully temperature stable reagents, enable Sample prep automation and reduce the sample preparation with development related to Powerblade.

Spacecraft Water Impurities Monitor (SWIM): The development of an in-flight water quality monitor for organic and inorganic impurities to protect crew health and vehicle hardware.

Particulate Monitor: Provide a flight demonstration of an aerosol monitor to measure particles in the crew respiratory hazard range. The suite of aerosol sensors will collect passive samples, detect and distinguish aerosols of varied sizes and types and detect siloxanes.

The Portable Tunable Laser Spectrometer (PTLS) is a real-time, wireless-communicating sensor network that measures carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor using parts-per-million sensitivity. Open-path tunable laser spectrometers are distributed at strategic locations throughout the crew cabin to provide an improved understanding of the spatiotemporal characteristics of a crewed spacecraft cabin environment. The goal of this high-density sensor network is to provide the needed insight for adapting the cabin air quality standards as verifiable requirements for human exploration environmental monitoring.

Monitoring air and water quality provides an early warning to astronauts that a system may need maintenance or may be failing. The astronauts can then perform the necessary work to bring the systems back within safe operating limits. Monitoring the microbial environment provides information to the astronauts to help them mitigate microbial growth in the spacecraft.

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