The November, 1998, edition of Vanity Fair carries an excerpt from Bryan Burroughs' forthcoming book about the Mir space station saga. In it, Navy MD Jerry Linenger is reported as having been concerned about the wellness of the cosmonauts he left behind upon his return to terra firma. They had, after all, been exposed to some potentially serious health risks during the course of his stay on board, including coolant chemical leaks and even a flash fire.

So the first thing his replacement, Mike Foale, did upon his arrival on Mir was check his crewmates' faces for telltale signs of reaction to deleterious substances. Foale, however, detected nothing unusual in their visages.

Tom Limero and John James could have saved him the trouble.

Tom is Toxicology Section Supervisor at Wyle Laboratories Inc., Life Sciences Systems and Services. Wyle is a support contractor for NASA's Medical Sciences Division at Johnson Space Center. John is Tom's counterpart at NASA.

HP's GC/MSD System

A major area of concern for the Medical Sciences Division is the environmental aspect of space flight, encompassing air, water, and radiation. Tom and John focus on air quality, and to that end, their group engages in three activities: prevention, air quality evaluation, and the development of new instrumentation for use on board space craft.

In the area of prevention, the division tests every piece of medical hardware slated to fly into space prior to its installation to verify that it will emit no gases harmful to its human companions. Tom's group receives the instrument, heats it up, collects samples of the air surrounding it, and performs a GC/MS analysis. The results are sent to John's group of toxicologists at NASA, who determine whether the instrument exceeds the agency's concentration limits.

The fun begins

It is in the area of air quality evaluation, however, where the fun begins. Two kinds of inflight samples are collected, archival and real-time. Archival samples are collected by the astronauts and/or cosmonauts for each mission and returned to the lab for analysis.

Mission Specialist Shanon Lucid with grab sample container onboard MIR

And what have they found in the air up there?

"I think the first surprise we had was early on, when the GC/mass spec data turned up a pretty high level of freon. Freon 82, actually," John James recalls. "We went through a fair amount of effort to identify it, because it's a very unusual compound. The people we reported it to thought it was a mistake, but when we told the Russians, they weren't surprised. Some system had leaked. They were aware of it, they just didn't tell us."

As it turned out, of course, the levels of freon weren't toxic.

When the solid fuel oxygen generator (SFOG), caught fire it emitted a lot of contaminants. Using the solid sorbent air sampler in its emergency mode, Jerry Linenger was able to activate sample collections over the next 30 hours. Using those and the other archival samples on board, the air quality laboratory subsequently determined the levels and duration of air pollution in the Mir.

"We saw carbon monoxide, benzene, some nitrites and isopropanols," notes John, "at unusually high levels right after the fire. We were able to show that they declined very quickly, however, based on our GC/MS analyses. Thirty hours after the fire, the air was pretty well scrubbed to the cleanliness it had been before the fire."

In other words, the air purification system was really doing its job.

In the area of real-time measurements, the laboratory has a combustion products analyzer on board looking for carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride and hydrogen cyanide. "We hope we never see measurable amounts of HCN or HCl on board" says John James, "but they could be produced in fires."

Planning for Mars

Looking back at the SFOG fire, the way the samples were taken allowed the Medical Sciences Group to look at the efficiency of the cleanup. This helps in planning for the future - a lunar base and a Mars landing.

"The space station is set," says Tom. "The air monitoring hardware is either built or in construction. We're looking at its replacement at the end of its three-to-five year life expectancy. But a lunar base or a Mars expedition have a whole different set of problems."

Mission Specialist Bonnie Dunbar and the VOA/RME

"The International Space Station will be a valuable learning experience for us in developing the requirements and the hardware that will be necessary to go to Mars," John James observes.

According to author Bryan Burroughs, Mir will fall to a watery grave in June of 1999. For Limero and James, its demise will signal the beginning of a new era in space travel. And a whole new set of challenges for them.