Astronauts Could One Day End Up Eating Asteroids
Date
10/5/2024 3:10:11 PM
(MENAFN- AzerNews)
Future astronauts could eat a nutritionally perfect diet made
from bacteria reared on ground-up asteroids, to produce a kind of
milkshake or yogurt, according to New Scientist,
Azernews reports.
While astronauts on the International Space Station have
experimented with growing salad leaves, the vast majority of food
consumed in space is transported from Earth. This would become
impossible for more distant, longer-lasting space missions, so
Joshua Pearce at Western University in Ontario, Canada, and his
colleagues decided to investigate using bacteria to convert
carbon-containing compounds from asteroids into edible food.
They have yet to carry out this process using real asteroids,
but Pearce and his team have performed similar experiments using
bacteria to break down plastic from leftover army ration packets.
To do this, they heated the plastic in the absence of oxygen, a
process called pyrolysis, and then fed this to a mixture of
bacteria that eat carbon.
“When you look at the pyrolysis breakdown products that we know
that bacteria can eat, and then what's in asteroids, it matches up
pretty reasonably, actually,” says Pearce.“So I think this can
actually work.”
The collective bacteria end up looking“something like a caramel
milkshake”, says Pearce, and the team has also experimented with
drying out this substance to produce something like yogurt or even
a powder.
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