Astronauts can ‘eat’ asteroids

Ensuring enough food during deep space travel is a big problem. Growing food is difficult and requires a lot of resources. Meanwhile, relying only on available food sources will be very risky on a long trip.

In new research published in the journal The International Journal of Astrobiology on October 3a group of scientists at Western University OntarioCanada, proposed that astronauts could use a special source of nutrition: asteroids.

Of course, astronauts don’t need to actually eat ice. The team’s idea is to use a combination of chemical and physical processes to dissolve the asteroid, then feed the dissolved material to beneficial microorganisms. These microorganisms will turn the asteroid into “biomass” (biological material from living organisms) that could technically feed astronauts.

This idea was inspired by an investigation by the US Department of Defense into how to recycle plastic containers containing military rations and turn them into food. First, the plastic is broken down into gas and oil by pyrolysis. The oil is fed to microorganisms inside a bioreactor, becoming nutritional biomass.

Simply put, researchers are looking for ways to recycle carbon into something that resembles food, and the same could apply to carbon-rich asteroids like Bennu in space.

“If we feed fresh, pristine meteorites to microorganisms, what will happen?” asked Annemiek Waajen, a postdoctoral fellow at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. According to research by Waajen in two magazines Astrobiology and Scientific Reportsmicroorganisms will consume the meteorite’s carbon and grow.

Meteorites may also have helped make the early Earth habitable and influenced the early evolution of organisms, Waajen said: There are a lot of meteorites around ancient single-celled organisms. “A lot of meteorite material fell onto the Earth’s surface around the time life began,” Waajen said.

However, before astronauts can eat asteroids, scientists still have a lot of work to do. For example, they don’t know yet whether the biomass created is toxic or not, not to mention asteroid mining is also a challenging process.

Waajen admits that the solution to eating asteroids is still a long way from being realized. However, the team is excited to test the new idea. “I promised to be the first to taste it. If I’m still alive, we can continue with the graduate students,” Professor of engineering Joshua Pearce at the University of Western Ontario, co-author of the new study, shared.