NASA’s BioNutrients collection of experiments is testing methods to make use of microorganisms to make vitamins that shall be wanted for human well being throughout future long-duration deep area exploration missions. Some important vitamins lack the shelf-life wanted to span multi-year human missions, equivalent to a mission to Mars, and should should be produced in area to help astronaut well being. To satisfy this want, the BioNutrients challenge makes use of a biomanufacturing strategy much like making acquainted fermented meals, equivalent to yogurt. However these meals additionally will embody particular sorts and quantities of vitamins that crew will be capable to eat sooner or later.
The primary experiment within the collection, BioNutrients-1, got down to assess the five-year stability and efficiency of a hand-held system – referred to as a manufacturing pack – that makes use of an engineered microorganism, yeast, to fabricate recent nutritional vitamins on-demand and in area. The BioNutrients-1 experiments started after a number of units of manufacturing packs launched to the station in 2019. This assortment included spare manufacturing packs as backups for use in case an experiment must be re-run throughout the five-year research. The deliberate experiments concluded in January 2024 spare manufacturing packs nonetheless remaining aboard the orbiting lab and within the BioNutrients lab at NASA’s Ames Analysis Heart in California’s Silicon Valley, the place the bottom staff runs experiments in parallel to the crew operations.
Leaders at NASA’s Worldwide House Station and Sport Altering Growth packages labored to coordinate the crew time wanted to carry out a further BioNutrients-2 experiment utilizing the spare packs. This prolonged the research’s timeline to nearly six years in orbit, permitting worthwhile crew observations and information from the extra experiment run to be utilized to a follow-on experiment, BioNutrients-3, which accomplished its analog astronaut experiment in April 2024, and is deliberate to launch to the station this yr. Astronauts on the area station will freeze the pattern and ultimately it is going to be returned to Earth for evaluation to see how a lot yeast grew and the way a lot nutrient the experiment produced. This may assist us perceive how the shelf stability of the packets.
