Abstract
After 11 months of successful operation onboard the ISSUS laboratory Destiny, the air quality monitors ANITA(Analyzing Interferometer for Ambient Air) was broughtback to Earth on STS126 (ULF2). ANITA is a technologydemonstrator flight experiment for continuous air qualitymonitoring inside the crewed cabin of the ISS with lowdetection limits and high time resolution. For the firsttime, the dynamics of the detected trace gasconcentrations could be directly resolved by ANITA andcorrelated to gas events in the cabin. The system is the result of a long term ESA technologydevelopment programme initiated more than seventeenyears ago. The ANITA mission was a cooperative projectbetween ESA and NASA. ESA’s responsibilities were theprovision of the H/W, the data acquisition and the dataevaluation. NASA was responsible for the launch,accommodation and operation onboard ISS, data downloadand the transportation of ANITA back to the Earth. ANITA was calibrated to detect and quantify 30 tracegases simultaneously with down tosub-ppm (parts per million) detection limits in addition tothe always present background gases carbon dioxideand water vapour. The results of the mission aresummarised in [1]. Further, with a specially developed gas bag hand pumpsystem also gas analyses were performed on airsamples from Node 1 of the Space Station. ANITA is a precursor for a permanent continuous tracegas monitoring system ANITA2 for ISS and future spacevehicles. At the time of the conference the follow-onstudy on ANITA2 will have been initiated. This paper describes the measurement system, thelessons learned during the mission on ISS, and theplanned follow-on activities. The work described hasbeen performed under contract of the European SpaceAgency.