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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday March 12 2020, @11:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the weee! dept.

International Space Station system that turns astronaut pee into drinking water getting 'much appreciated' boost:

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).


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:44PM (5 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Thursday March 12 2020, @02:44PM (#970232)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday March 12 2020, @05:15PM (2 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Thursday March 12 2020, @05:15PM (#970296) Journal

    Wow I didn't think of that. From now on I am only drinking 0w30

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    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @10:06PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2020, @10:06PM (#970411)

      Dude that's dinosaur turds! Stick to synthetics.

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 13 2020, @03:14AM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday March 13 2020, @03:14AM (#970531) Journal

        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.

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        Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 2) by deadstick on Thursday March 12 2020, @11:44PM

    by deadstick (5110) on Thursday March 12 2020, @11:44PM (#970464)

    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

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday March 13 2020, @03:01AM (#970522) Journal

    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.

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    Washington DC delenda est.