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Microbes may help astronauts transform human waste into food
Human waste may one day be a valuable resource for astronauts on deep-space missions. Now, a Penn State research team has shown that it is possible to rapidly break down solid and liquid waste to grow food with a series of microbial reactors, while simultaneously minimizing pathogen growth.
"We envisioned and tested the concept of simultaneously treating astronauts' waste with microbes while producing a biomass that is edible either directly or indirectly depending on safety concerns," said Christopher House, professor of geosciences, Penn State. "It's a little strange, but the concept would be a little bit like Marmite or Vegemite where you're eating a smear of 'microbial goo.'"
[...] "Each component is quite robust and fast and breaks down waste quickly," said House. "That's why this might have potential for future space flight. It's faster than growing tomatoes or potatoes."
Today, astronauts aboard the International Space Station recycle a portion of water from urine, but the process is energy intensive, said House. Solid waste management has been a bigger hurdle. This currently is ejected into the Earth's atmosphere where it burns up.
"Imagine if someone were to fine-tune our system so that you could get 85 percent of the carbon and nitrogen back from waste into protein without having to use hydroponics or artificial light," said House. "That would be a fantastic development for deep-space travel."
Coupling of anaerobic waste treatment to produce protein- and lipid-rich bacterial biomass (DOI: 10.1016/j.lssr.2017.07.006) (DX)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 30 2018, @04:46PM (1 child)
As a cosmic ray physicist, I want to point out that yes it is indeed a complicated problem, and what makes it so complicated is that shielding effectiveness is dependent upon the energy of the particle. For certain charges and energies, thin aluminum is worse because you can create more ionizing radiation secondaries (knock-on particles, "delta rays", etc.) in the aluminum, but that effect goes down as the particle incident energy goes up. And we cosmic ray physicists scoff at what nuclear physicists think are very high energies.
I remain very pessimistic about the prospects for a reasonably safe trip to Mars from the standpoint of radiation exposure. Apart from ideas mentioned like boring out an asteroid, it will be very expensive and massive to get a sufficient amount of shielding material up. You can't shield against the galactic cosmic rays, but fortunately the fluxes of those particles are orders of magnitude lower than the solar cosmic rays (but though it will be low, they will be a source of constant radiation). It will be an optimization problem where you'll be shielding against anticipated solar storms. It will probably be a trade-off between the expected background vs. the worst case. The astronauts will probably also need luck in avoiding going through any major storms.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:37AM
In your opinion, is there any hope in shielding astronauts by means of magnetic fields? I don't think the tech is there yet to create a powerful enough artificial magnetosphere, but theoretically it could be done. Would that be sufficient?