Samples from asteroid Ryugu
JAXA
Future astronauts may eat a nutritionally good weight-reduction plan constituted of micro organism reared on ground-up asteroids, to provide a sort of milkshake or yogurt.
Whereas astronauts on the Worldwide Area Station have experimented with rising salad leaves, the overwhelming majority of meals consumed in area is transported from Earth. This is able to grow to be unattainable for extra distant, longer-lasting area missions, so Joshua Pearce at Western College in Ontario, Canada, and his colleagues determined to research utilizing micro organism to transform carbon-containing compounds from asteroids into edible meals.
They’ve but to hold out this course of utilizing actual asteroids, however Pearce and his workforce have carried out related experiments utilizing micro organism to interrupt down plastic from leftover military ration packets. To do that, they heated the plastic within the absence of oxygen, a course of referred to as pyrolysis, after which fed this to a mix of micro organism 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 micro organism find yourself wanting “something like a caramel milkshake”, says Pearce, and the workforce has additionally experimented with drying out this substance to provide one thing like yogurt or perhaps a powder.
Whereas that may not sound notably appetising, Pearce says the micro organism are remarkably well-suited for human wants. “We did a nutritional analysis, and it turns out to be almost a perfect food,” he says. “It turns out that the bacteria consortium that we were using, more or less, has a third each for protein, carbs and fat.”
If the thought is sound, a 500-metre-wide asteroid just like Bennu, which NASA visited in 2020, may feed between 600 and 17,000 astronauts for a yr, says Pearce. The precise quantity relies on how effectively the micro organism can digest the asteroid’s carbon compounds.
A completely operational asteroid meals mission would require an “industrial-sized super machine” in area, he says, however the researchers hope to start testing the thought on a smaller scale within the coming yr, beginning off with coal after which transferring to meteorites which have fallen to Earth, which they’re presently engaged on a proposal for. “It’s super expensive and we have to destroy [the meteorites], so the people that collect rocks were not happy when we made these proposals,” says Pearce.
“There is definitely potential there, but it is still a very futuristic and exploratory idea,” says Annemiek Waajen at Free College Amsterdam. “It is good to think about these things, but in terms of technique, there is still quite some development necessary to be able to use these methods.”
The success of the method will rely upon how lots of the carbon compounds inside asteroids are appropriate for bacterial meals, says Waajen. Based mostly on meteorite compositions on Earth, it’s prone to be someplace in the midst of the vary the workforce calculated, she says.
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