Executive Summary : | Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Department of space, India has inaugurated Human Space Flight Centre (HSFC) on 30th January 2019 at ISRO Headquarter, Bengaluru, India. HSFC is the agency take care of implanting GAGANYAAN mission, where 3 crew members will be on 3 day mission with the help of human spaceflight and objective is to bring them back safely. How to safeguard an astronaut's health is a crucial problem during and after Human spaceflight operations. Uncomfortably, astronauts who have experienced microgravity and space travel have shown a variety of neurologic abnormalities, including acute ataxia, postural issues, perceptual illusions, neuromuscular weakness, and weariness due to exposure to various hazardous chemicals. One of such hazardous gas is formaldehyde (CH2O), which enter the human spaceflights due to thermo-degradation of polymer materials used in the Human spaceflight, fixatives from payload experiments or from the oxidation of the contaminants in the controls system. Prolonged exposure of the formaldehyde is carcinogenic and also damage the respiration system of the Astronauts. NASA/JSC Toxicology Group in cooperation with the National Research Council Committee on Toxicology (NRCCOT) has provide the guidelines for Spacecraft maximum allowable concentrations (SMACs). If the potential exposure duration is for short-term (1 and 24 hour) then 0.4 ppm exposure leads minor reversible effects such as mild mucosal irritation. On the other hand, long-term exposure (7-180 days) of about 0.04 ppm leads to complete Mucosa organ damage. Thus, to ensure proper, astronaut's health it is important to abide by SMACs guidelines released by NASA/JSC Toxicology Group [1]. Researchers have explored various methods to measures Formaldehyde (CH2O), which includes spectrophotometry, polarography, gas chromatography and fluorimeter. However, this methods are bulky and expensive. In current status, commercial sensors and systems are available ((F-12D Gas Transmitter-Formaldehyde (GasSensing), (S-500EF Formaldehyde Sensor (GasSensing), MIRA Pico VOC (AERIS Technologies), Model H-CHO - (Chromatotec Group), which have high operating voltage, limited operating temperature range, limited SMACs range and more importantly they are expensive as tabulated in Table 1. However, these sensor system are mainly designed for smart city, environmental monitoring and industry applications. Table. 1 shows the comparison of the proposed E-Nose system to detect hazardous formaldehyde with few commercially available formaldehyde (CH2O) sensor systems, which illustrates state of art and novel technology proposed in this work. Proposed E-nose system comprise of Interdigitated Electrodes (IDEs) on the silicon substrate and has 2D Nanomaterial rGO/TiO2) as the sensing film, low operating voltage and SMACs recommend formaldehyde range, portable and light weight (200 gm). |