ASTRONAUTS in the future could eat asteroids in a mind-boggling plan revealed by top scientists.
In the bizarre-sounding scheme, bacteria reared on ground-up asteroids would be used to make a nutritionally perfect milkshake or yoghurt.
Although astronauts on the International Space Station have done experiments with growing salad leaves, most of the food consumed in space has to be transported from Earth.
This would be impossible to do for longer-lasting and more distant missions in outer space.
With that problem in mind, Joshua Pearce, at Western University in Ontario, Canada, along with his colleagues decided to research the possibility of using bacteria as a way to convert carbon-containing compounds from asteroids into edible food.
While the scientists have yet to carry out this process using real asteroids, Pearce and his team have carried out similar experiments using bacteria to break down plastic from leftover army ration packs.
This was done by heating the plastic in the absence of oxygen, a process called pyrolysia, and then fed this to the bacteria that eat carbon.
Pearce told the NewScientist: “When you look at the pyrolysis breakdown products that we know that bacteria can eat, and then what’s in asteroids, it matches up pretty reasonably, actually.
“So I think this can actually work.”
The bacteria end up looking “something like a caramel milkshake,” Pearce said.
Pearce and his team have also experimented with drying out this substance to create something like yoghurt or even a powder.
Although the end result may not sound to be particularly appetising, Pearce said the bacteria are actually remarkably well-suited for a human diet.
He added: “We did a nutritional analysis, and it turns out to be almost a perfect food.
“It turns out that the bacteria consortium that we were using, more or less, has a third each for protein, carbs and fat.”
If the idea proves to be solid, Pearce said a 500-metre-wide asteroid, similar to Bennu, which NASA visited in 2020, could feed between 600 and 17,000 astronauts for a year.
The exact amount would depend on how efficient the bacteria were in digesting the asteroid’s carbon compounds.
Any asteroid food project that was fully operational would need an “industrial-sized super machine” in space, according to Pearce.
However, the researchers hope to start carrying out testing on a smaller scale next year.
They hope to start with coal before moving on to meteorites which have fallen to Earth, and are currently working on a proposal.
Pearce said: “It’s super expensive and we have to destroy [the meteorites], so the people that collect rocks were not happy when we made these proposals.”
Annemiek Waajen, at the Free University Amsterdam, said: “There is definitely potential there, but it is still a very futuristic and exploratory idea.
“It is good to think about these things, but in terms of technique, there is still quite some development necessary to be able to use these methods.”
Waajen added the success of the process would depend on how many of the carbon compounds inside asteroids were suitable for bacterial food.
This, based on meteorite compositions on Earth, is expected to be somewhere in the middle of the range, according to the team’s calculations.
It comes after it was revealed last month that scientists have an Armageddon-style plan to fire nukes at asteroids that may be considered a threat to Earth.
The Hollywood-esque plot suggests detonating a nuclear bomb roughly a mile away from the space rock to help knock it off course.
What’s the difference between an asteroid, meteor and comet?
Here’s what you need to know, according to Nasa…
- Asteroid: An asteroid is a small rocky body that orbits the Sun. Most are found in the asteroid belt (between Mars and Jupiter) but they can be found anywhere (including in a path that can impact Earth)
- Meteoroid: When two asteroids hit each other, the small chunks that break off are called meteoroids
- Meteor: If a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it begins to vapourise and then becomes a meteor. On Earth, it’ll look like a streak of light in the sky, because the rock is burning up
- Meteorite: If a meteoroid doesn’t vapourise completely and survives the trip through Earth’s atmosphere, it can land on the Earth. At that point, it becomes a meteorite
- Comet: Like asteroids, a comet orbits the Sun. However rather than being made mostly of rock, a comet contains lots of ice and gas, which can result in amazing tails forming behind them (thanks to the ice and dust vaporizing)