The Altair Lunar Lander will enable astronauts to learn to live and work on the moon for extended periods of time, providing the experience needed to expand human exploration farther into the solar system. My overriding recommendation: Use independent and complementary [sometimes referred to as 'orthogonal'] techniques to disambiguate confounding/interfering signals. E.g.: a mass spectrometer ['MS'], which currently serves as a Majority Constituent Analyzer ['MCA'] can be very valuable in detecting the presence of a gaseous specie, so long as it falls on a mass-to-charge ratio ['m/z'] that is not already occupied by a majority constituent of cabin air. Consider the toxic gas, CO. Both N{sub 2} and CO have parent peaks of m/z = 28, and CO{sub 2} has a fragment peak at m/z = 28 [and at 16 and 12], so the N{sub 2} and CO{sub 2} m/z=28 signals could mask low, but potentially-dangerous levels of CO. However there are numerous surface-sensitive CO detectors, as well as tunable-diode-laser-based CO sensors that could provide independent monitoring of CO. Also, by appending a gas chromatograph ['GC'] as the front-end sample processer, prior to the inlet of the MS, one can rely upon the GC to separate CO from N{sub 2} …

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