Samples from asteroid Ryugu
JAXA
Future astronauts may be able to eat a nutritionally complete meal made from bacteria grown on crushed asteroids, creating a type of milkshake or yogurt.
Astronauts on the International Space Station are experimenting with growing salad leaves, but most of the food consumed in space comes from Earth. This would not be possible with space missions farther away and over longer durations, so Joshua Pearce and colleagues at Western University in Ontario, Canada, are turning carbon-containing compounds from asteroids into edible foods. decided to research the use of bacteria for transformation.
Although they have not yet performed this process using real asteroids, Pearce and his team performed a similar experiment using bacteria that breaks down plastic from leftover military ration packets. . To do this, they heated the plastic in the absence of oxygen, a process called pyrolysis, and fed this to a mixture of carbon-eating bacteria.
“If you look at the pyrolysis products that bacteria are known to eat and the materials found in asteroids, there’s actually a pretty reasonable match,” Pearce said. “So I think this really works.”
The bacterial aggregates end up being “something like a caramel milkshake,” Pearce said, and the team is also experimenting with drying the material to make something like yogurt or powder.
Although it may not be very appetizing, Pearce says this bacteria is highly suited for human needs. “We did a nutritional analysis and found it to be a nearly perfect food,” he says. “We found that the bacterial consortium we were using was more or less allocating a third each to protein, carbohydrates, and fat.”
If this idea is correct, a 500-meter-wide asteroid similar to Bennu, which NASA visited in 2020, could feed between 600 and 17,000 astronauts for a year, Pierce said. say. The exact amount depends on how efficiently the bacteria can digest the asteroid’s carbon compounds.
A fully operational asteroid food project would require an “industrial-sized supermachine” in space, but researchers will begin testing the idea on a small scale next year, starting with coal. He says he wants to move on to meteorites next. They are currently working on that proposal. “When we made this proposal, the people who collect the stones weren’t happy because it’s very expensive and[meteorite]would have to be destroyed,” Pearce said.
“There’s definitely potential there, but it’s still a very futuristic and exploratory idea,” says Annemiek Wagen of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “It’s good to think about these things, but in terms of technology, there’s still quite a bit of development to be done before these methods can be used.”
The success of this process depends on how much of the carbon compounds in the asteroid are suitable for food for bacteria, Wagen said. Based on the composition of meteorites on Earth, it’s likely somewhere in the middle of the range calculated by the research team, she says.
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