FOOD FOR MARS

Foods destined for Space shuttle missions must have a shelf life of a year, and 18 months if they’ll be deployed on the International Space Station. Of the roughly 65 foods currently available for stocking spacecraft and deemed really palatable by NASA taste panels, 10 will lose their appeal within a year — turning off-color, mushy or tasteless. By the end of five years the food will down to seven items.

  images from pixabay

Indeed, after one year, space food exhibits notable losses of vitamin A, folic acid (an important B vitamin) and thiamine (another B vitamin that plays a role in the body’s use of carbs and certain building blocks of proteins). And nutrient losses don’t end there, Perchonok says. Basically, after one year, we are out of vitamin C.

Sure, NASA could supply astronauts with multi-vitamin pills. But that’s no panacea, Perchonok observes, since preliminary studies by NASA have shown that the potency of vitamins diminishes faster in pills than it does in foods.

images from pixabay

Clearly, she says, these food-nutrient losses are “pretty serious.” So if NASA wants to be able to stock a spacecraft for Mars travel, “we’ve got a problem”.

Using current propulsion systems, the space agency has to plan on it taking between 6 and 8 months to travel each way to Mars, Perchonok explains. Since Mars and Earth come close to each other only once every other year, crews “will have to stay on the surface for 18 months” before returning home, she adds

Because glitches may arise or crews may be asked to help stock a Martian pantry for followup visitors from Earth, NASA’s goal is the development of foods that will remain both safe and appetizing for at least five years.

 images from pixabay

Canned goods have a good shelf life, but can’t be heated in microwaves — and are considerably heavier than the pouches that astronaut food is dispensed in today. And weight is a big issue. It constitutes about 15 percent of the payload of food, which is expected to weigh 9,660 kilograms (10.6 U.S. tons) for a crew of 6 heading out to Mars

To keep the weight down, foods are eaten in their packaging. And today’s foil-lined pouches tend to work well when conventionally heat sterilized — but can delaminate when their contents are subjected to “pressure assisted” thermal sterilization.

MREs must have a shelf life of three years at 26 °C. The new technology’s real benefit is taste, he noted. A salmon fillet in Alfredo sauce processed with the new pressure-assisted technology not only tastes yummy, he says, but also “looks like a salmon that was poached — not like cat food

Taste is a particularly pivotal issue for astronaut food: Crews need to eat every bite of what they open up. Crumbs from cookies or crackers can make a mess and eventually get into someone’s eyes, Perchonok says. Wet foods that aren’t completely gobbled up will eventually go bad and stink up a spacecraft. Which can become especially nasty since astronauts don’t take out the trash every day but bring it back home with them or hold it for months until they can pack it into a craft that is destined to travel towards Earth’s surface (but actually incinerate in the atmosphere

NASA needs new ideas for light-weight, very air-tight flexible food packaging that can seal in freshness and sterility for at least three years. Luckily, there should be ample time to find such alternatives since travel to Mars is still many years away, Perchonok says: “Probably 2035 at the earliest”