During the last years extensive work has been done to design and develop the Closed Loop Air Revitalization System ARES. The potential of ARES for future space exploration missions is to significantly reduce the water upload demand, increase the safety of the crew by reducing dependency on re-supply flights and, due to the launch mass restraints, make future exploration missions to other planets possible.
The ARES demonstrator includes the functions of CO2 concentration, CO2 reduction and oxygen generation. Whereas in previous phases ARES was designed to operate in NODE3 of the ISS, this has been changed to an intended ARES operation in the Russian Multifunctional Laboratory Module MLM.
This year’s activities concentrated on process optimization of the Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CCA) interaction with the Sabatier Reactor (CRA), extreme conditions testing, life time tests with the Sabatier Reactor and the oxygen generation stack and system testing. Furthermore the Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA) has been upgraded to EM standard mainly with commercial-off-the-shelf components.
The new design minimizes the number of external interfaces to autonomously operate in MLM.
The paper describes the current development status, reports assembly test results and describes the current and future work within the development process.