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Frequently Asked Questions

 

Why does NASA need an electronic nose?

The ability to monitor the constituents of the breathing air in a closed chamber in which air is recycled is important to NASA for use in closed environments such as the space shuttle and the space station. At present, the best real time, broad band air quality monitor available in space habitats is the human nose. It is limited by human factors such as fatigue and exposure to toxins. For now, air quality is determined after a spaceflight by collecting samples and analyzing them on the ground using laboratory analytical instruments such as a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS). The availability of a miniature, portable instrument capable of identifying contaminants in the breathing environment at part-per-million levels would greatly enhance the ability to monitor the quality of recycled air as well as providing notification of the presence of potentially dangerous substances from spills and leaks. Such an instrument is the Electronic Nose now under development at JPL and Caltech. The overall goal of the program at JPL/Caltech is the development of a miniature sensor which may be used to monitor the breathing air in the international space station, and which may be coordinated with the environmental control system to solve air quality problems without crew intervention.

What is an electronic nose?

An electronic nose is an array of non-specific chemical sensors, controlled and analyzed electronically, which mimics the action of the mammalian nose by recognizing patterns of response to vapors. The sensors used here are conductometric chemical sensors which change resistance when exposed to vapors. The sensors are not specific to any one vapor; it is in the use of an array of sensors, each with a different sensing medium, that gases and gas mixtures can be identified by the pattern of response of the array. Electronic Noses have been discussed by several authors, and may be applied to environmental monitoring and quality control in such wide fields as food processing, and industrial environmental monitoring.

How does an electronic nose work?

Most existing chemical sensors are designed to detect specific molecules. Array-based sensing uses non-specific sensors in which the pattern and magnitude of response are used to identify and quantify the presence of contaminants. Array-based sensors are based on a biological model of "sniffing", detecting changes in odor, and can be trained to detect new patterns. With an electronic nose, a baseline of clean air is established, and deviations from that baseline are recorded as changes in resistance of the sensors. The pattern of distributed response of the sensors may be deconvoluted, and contaminants identified and quantified by using a software analysis program such as pattern recognition and/or neural network.

 

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