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Through the last decade ESA (European Space Agency) have developed a TGM (Trace Gas Monitoring) system for spacecraft air analysis from paper study to a fully operational breadboard [1–9]. The TGM system is a combination of FTIR spectrometry and specially developed analysis techniques. Ongoing work aims at a system flight experiment on e.g. the Space Shuttle early in 2003 [10]. This paper mainly covers the application of the TGM breadboard for a competitive blind testing on unknown multi-gas mixtures arranged by NASA. The TGM HW was applied as is, but a special calibration for the NASA test scenario was made. Four different system suppliers competed in the testing, and the ESA TGM system performed clearly best [11]. This independently defined and supervised testing has confirmed that the ESA TGM system is reliable to perform quasi-real time gas measurements in the concentration ranges required by ESA.

In this paper, an advanced trace gas monitoring system for manned space cabins is presented. The principle of functioning of the measurement system is based on the detection of gas-specific absorption features in the Infrared area of the spectrum. The core element in the monitoring system is a Fourier-Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectrometer. When calibration is carried out applying sophisticated, novel analysis methods, the system can simultaneously detect and quantify all the interesting gases in manned space cabins. In a previous Trace Gas Monitoring multi-phase program (TGM 2) [1],[2], the FTIR technology has demonstrated its ability to handle multi-component, quasi on-line gas measurements, including identification and quantification of 23 important trace gases in a mixture. In the ongoing phase 3 (TGM 3), initiated end of 1997 [3], a fully operational FTIR technology demonstration model is tested being able to detect simultaneously 30 different trace gases in a mixture.