Atmosphere Resource Recovery & Environmental Monitoring for Long Duration Exploration Project (ARREM)

The AES Atmosphere Resource Recovery & Environmental Monitoring (ARREM) for Long Duration Exploration Project project is maturing Atmosphere Revitalization Systems (ARS) and Environmental Monitoring (EM) systems that will reduce risk, lower lifecycle cost, and validate operational process design and system architectural concepts for future human exploration missions. The project is maturing these technologies using the ISS state-of-the-art hardware as a point of departure.   This project merged into the AES Life Support Systems Project in FY15.

The project focuses on key physico-chemical process technologies for Atmosphere Revitalization Systems (ARS) that increase reliability, capability, and consumable mass recovery as well as reduce requirements for power, volume, heat rejection, and crew involvement. For the Environmental Monitoring (EM) systems effort, the project is developing and demonstrating onboard analysis capabilities that will replace the need to return air and water samples to earth for ground analysis. This effort is addressing these challenges by adopting a new architecture that is based on the modular integration of multiple sensing modalities, employing a hybrid combination of simple, rugged technologies and, where needed, highly capable complex approaches, to completely address monitoring needs of the future. It incorporates Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) technologies to enable significant miniaturization over current systems, and selects elements offering both low resources and high reliability operation for affordability. The project is developing, demonstrating and/or testing leading process technology candidates and system architectures that will meet or exceed current requirements and fill capability gaps or significantly improve the efficiency, safety, and reliability over the state-of-the-art (SOA). The project's main goal is to demonstrate test articles (at various technology readiness levels) in a ground test facility under relevant flight conditions.