Posted on 06/08/2005 5:29:35 PM PDT by KevinDavis
No matter what mission astronauts will carry out on the moon and Mars during future planetary expeditions, they will certainly have to breathe.
To make sure their air is clean, a team of NASA researchers and Spacehab engineers have teamed up to develop miniaturized detectors which, they hope, will lead to a compact, real-time air monitoring system for future spacecraft.
“It will be increasingly important as we get past the space station on to the moon or Mars,” said John James, NASA’s chief toxicologist at Johnson Space Center, in a telephone interview. “Right now, we don’t have space shuttles going back and forth to the station, so it is difficult to get air samples back down for analysis.”
NASA’s space shuttle fleet has been grounded since the Columbia disaster in 2003, in which the Columbia orbiter and its seven-astronaut crew were lost during reentry. The space agency is planning to launch its first return to flight mission, STS-114 aboard the shuttle Discovery, no early than July 13. In the meantime, Russian Soyuz spacecraft have returned archival air samples to scientists on Earth
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
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Not particularly. If NASA thinks this stuff is "cutting edge" analytical technology, they aren't keeping up with the state of the art very well GC's and Mass spectrometers have already been significantly reduced in size. For VOA, current GC technology can be built about the size of a cigar box .
It must be 'space-rated', which is to say it must have a developer and a multi-million dollar contract.
Yeah, but that's politics and not technology.
NASA is in its second day of reorganization. Fifty top positions, excepting manned space, are getting new job descriptions. The offices are being repainted from gray to beige. Wastebaskets will be square instead of round. Yep, it's going to be a lot different. Sure.
ROFLMAO!!!!!
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