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After 11 months of successful operation onboard the ISS US laboratory Destiny, the air quality monitors ANITA (Analyzing Interferometer for Ambient Air) was brought back to Earth on STS126 (ULF2). ANITA is a technology demonstrator flight experiment for continuous air quality monitoring inside the crewed cabin of the ISS with low detection limits and high time resolution. For the first time, the dynamics of the detected trace gas concentrations could be directly resolved by ANITA and correlated to gas events in the cabin. The system is the result of a long term ESA technology development programme initiated more than seventeen years ago. The ANITA mission was a cooperative project between ESA and NASA. ESA's responsibilities were the provision of the H/W, the data acquisition and the data evaluation. NASA was responsible for the launch, accommodation and operation onboard ISS, data download and the transportation of ANITA back to the Earth.

ECOSIM, a software tool for the simulation of ECLSS which has been developed for the European Space Agency (ESA), provides a powerful, friendly graphical interface to users. To test and verify the evolutional capability of ECOSIM for the simulation of ECLSS for future missions, and also to clarify the required future improvements to ECOSIM, the ECLSS of a Moon base, in its initial build-up phase, has been modelled and simulated, following the establishment of the necessary new component mathematical models, including biological ones.

Since 1975 ESA's TRP activities in the cryogenic domain have been steadily increasing. Before 1986 most of these activities were directed towards the development of cryogen technology. CRHESUS (CRyostat a HElium Superfluide pour Utilisation Spatiale) was a programme which helped develop superfluid helium technology within Europe. Since 1986 however a major step forward has been made in cryocooler technology, with an 80K cooler developed under TRP funding being recognised as the first viable space cryocooler. It is presently being sold by BAe (UK) as a commercial product. While keeping the basic design these cryocoolers are continuing to be developed down to lower temperatures. Coolers at 20K, 4K and 2.5K exist with 0.1K foreseen. Other cryogenic activities are discussed in the paper and the overall logic and direction of ESA's cryogenic TRP developments explained.

The ESTEC Large Space Simulator (LSS) is a facility which provides close simulation of in-orbit environmental conditions for spacecraft and payload testing. The LSS is equipped with a Motion System (MS), which allows spin rotation and attitude positioning of test objects. A part of the MS is the Slip-Ring Unit (SRU), located in the Spin box. The SRU makes it possible to transmit, among other, signals generated by temperature sensors fixed on the rotating test objects to a local Data Handling System. However, at present, only analog thermocouple channels are available for spacecraft temperature measurements. In order to extend the thermocouple channel capacity of the current SRU configuration and to make possible the acquisition unit has been conceived. Besides the multifunction feature, a particular effort has been made to achieve optimal measurement accuracy vs sensor type and to pursue the use of non-space qualified components.

With the successful retrieval of EURECA, the EUROPEAN RETRIEVABLE CARRIER, again a long term orbit satellite (11 month in space) is available for the space material community to investigate the influence of low earth orbit environment on materials which stayed in orbit for a prolonged time. EURECA, designed, manufactured and launched to carry out numerous experiments in the fields of fluid- and solar physics, materials science, biology and astronomy under orbital conditions, in parallel presents a huge material expositon experiment in itself, providing detailed insight into the possible orbital degradation mechanisms due to the synergistic effects of atomic oxygen, UV radiation, thermal cycling, high vacuum and micrometeorite/debris impacts. In order to exploit the valuable information, an integrated ESTEC/ERNO team has been established to perform a detailed investigation of the EURECA surface and - as far as accessible -internal structural parts and experiments.

This paper reports on the thermal testing of METOP (METerological OPerational satellite) Payload Module Engineering Model, conducted in May/June 2001 at ESTEC’s Large Space Simulator (LSS). The paper describes the logic for the selection of the test configuration, the test phases and the performed test sequences. The test results are presented and the correlation results between predicted and measured temperatures are discussed.