SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Water is heavy and hard to transport into orbit, which is why the International Space Station is a champion when it comes to recycling. Even astronaut urine is captured and processed to make it drinkable. The system that does this work is about to get an important upgrade.
The ISS water recovery system is tasked with turning wastewater into potable water. The urine-processing part of the system has been an ongoing concern. Astronauts will be installing a redesigned urine distillation assembly. This piece handles the crucial step of boiling urine to kick off the purification process.
"One of the most important things we've learned in the last 12 years of the hardware's orbital operation is that the hardware is vulnerable in its steam environment," said NASA's Jennifer Pruitt in a statement on Monday.
NASA said the upgrades are focused on internal redesigns, "including a new toothed belt drive system, bearing seals, Teflon spacer and liquid level sensor." If you want to dive into the details (including the technical glitches the system has encountered), then check out this NASA paper on the upgrades (PDF link).
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 12 2020, @11:53AM (8 children)
Why bother converting it? It's sterile, and I like the taste.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday March 12 2020, @01:49PM
If the body expels it, a reason of two may subsist.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:12PM (2 children)
Firstly, it clearly false in the case of a UTI, as the microbes living in the lower urinary tract haven't passed through the usual disinfecting path. And even then, in the absense of a UTI, it's still not true:
Abstract Title: Urine is Not Sterile: The Urinary Microbiota of Overactive Bladder Patients
Author Block: E. E. Hilt1, K. McKinley2, E. R. Mueller3, L. Brubaker3, P. C. Schreckenberger2, A. J. Wolfe1;
1Dept. of Microbiol., Loyola Univ. of Chicago, Maywood, IL, 2Dept. of Pathology, Loyola Univ. of Chicago, Maywood, IL, 3Dept. of Obstetrics/Gynecology & Urology, Loyola Univ. of Chicago, Maywood, IL
Keywords: Urinary microbiota,Overactive bladder
Abstract: Background Contrary to dogma that urine is sterile in the absence of a clinical urinary tract infection (UTI); our research team and others have recently shown the existence of a urinary microbiota in individuals with and without lower urinary tract symptoms. With the knowledge that the lower urinary tract possesses its own unique microbiota, we are exploring potential causes for lower urinary tract syndromes, such as overactive bladder syndrome (OAB), a disorder affecting ~15% of adult women. OAB is characterized by symptoms of urinary urgency, often with frequency and urgency incontinence, nocturia and a negative urine culture. ~40-50% of OAB patients do not respond to conventional anti-muscarinic drug treatment. One possible explanation for this lack of treatment response is a dysbiotic urinary microbiota. [...]
https://www.abstractsonline.com/Plan/ViewAbstract.aspx?sKey=7cc5632d-869d-477b-bdd2-6e4d710dfa9b&cKey=39a18326-5c79-4c87-b041-56e8d6c01b50&mKey=673511f0-c86b-432f-a387-058032b8500b
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 12 2020, @04:52PM (1 child)
C'mon, FatPhil. It's [youtube.com] a joke, son [youtube-nocookie.com].
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday March 12 2020, @07:34PM
Thanks for both of those!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:58PM (3 children)
Do you drink Budweiser?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday March 12 2020, @08:13PM (1 child)
No. But are you suggesting it is better than urine?
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @10:03PM
Sure it's better than some but not all. Kind of a middling urine taste.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 13 2020, @02:57AM
I'd say it's closer to Sapporo, except a little less bitter than that.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @12:14PM (10 children)
That did make me think of the technical difficulties of distilling a liquid in 0G.
How do you separate the steam from the liquid when they can both float?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:02PM (6 children)
Centripetal force, I guess. Or electrostatic. Or maybe you cool down the stuff and wait for a mass of water to form by mutual gravitational attraction of the molecules. That's not the problem. The problem is that you gotta drink your own pee.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:44PM (5 children)
Is it really that much worse than drinking everyone else's pee like we do on Earth? After all, if there's any cities upstream from you, you're drinking their treated sewage. Even if you stick to bottled beverages, you're just drinking ex-urine imported from somewhere else.
Heck, even if you're drinking pristine rainwater - practically every drop of water on the planet has been repeatedly passing through various animals kidneys for a few hundred million years now. Sometimes the atoms get temporarily rearranged as water is converted to biomass and back again, but the constituent atoms just keep being re-digested and excreted.
We live in a closed system - *everything* is recycled. The ISS is just a much smaller partially-closed extension of that system.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday March 12 2020, @05:15PM (2 children)
Wow I didn't think of that. From now on I am only drinking 0w30
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @10:06PM (1 child)
Dude that's dinosaur turds! Stick to synthetics.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 13 2020, @03:14AM
Amen to that. Just watched an episode [youtube.com] on YouTube of Les routes de l'impossible - Somaliland : Le Pays qui n'existe pas and those people use old canisters of synthetics to transport their camel milk to market. Safe as houses, synthetics are.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by deadstick on Thursday March 12 2020, @11:44PM
An entertaining exercise for an engineering class is to set a bottle of Dasani on the desk and estimate the probability that it contains at least one molecule peed by Julius Caesar. Spoiler: Pretty much a slam dunk.
Just a matter of concentration...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 13 2020, @03:01AM
That's a dirty, dirty lie, Immerman. The water we drink and use is lost to Earth forever and does not recycle at all. It's full of microplastics and Zanax and radiation from Fukushima. We're all gonna die in ten years from it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Funny) by FatPhil on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:14PM (2 children)
You always heard that astronauts were highly trained - now you know just how skillful they are.
And let's not even start on the topic of female astronauts!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 13 2020, @03:07AM (1 child)
Interesting, FatPhil. Do you suppose the directional hose of the male astronauts imparts more spin than that of the female astronauts, or is the moment of inertia of the females higher because of other anatomical features?
I only ask because the copy of I.S.S. Confidential by Anonymous that I sent away for has been delayed by the coronavirus.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday March 15 2020, @01:18PM
Which bit of "helicopter" did you not understand?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @04:40PM
If you talk about this you pretty much have to post this video with it....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-4BFfdGufo [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @10:09PM (1 child)
Asparagus removed from astronaut menus.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 13 2020, @03:09AM
Only some people have the gene to detect that. None of the current crew have it; Yuri tested them but I won't give away how.
Washington DC delenda est.