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Space Recycling!
Recycling every drop of water on the International Space Station means astronauts drinking their own urine.
Living in space has some special problems. The cramped, weightless environment makes even the simplest tasks like washing and drinking difficult. One of the biggest problems is going to the toilet; not just how to do it but what to do with the waste.
International Space Station engineers are working on a novel way to solve both these problems at once by building a recycling system that can turn the astronauts' own urine into clean drinkable water. On Earth water can be separated from the salty deposits in urine by evaporation but without gravity this process needs some help. The way they get around the problem in space is by making the system spin to create artificial gravity and allowing the water to evaporate.
This water collected from the urine is then added to all the other waste water from the space station including the shower water and condensation. It's put through filtration beds to remove all the impurities and finally heated to over 200ÂșC to kill off any bacteria or viruses.
They believe they'll then have water clean enough to drink. In fact engineers working on the project say their processed water is cleaner than tap water. To prove this assertion we tested conductivity - the less conductive the water, the purer it is. We compared the recycled water with tap water and unprocessed urine. In the test we found the processed water was about a hundred times less conductive than even the tap water.
If tests continue to go well the system will be added to the International Space Station in 2005. But more importantly it could be the first step to making communities in space self-sufficient. Once astronauts are no longer reliant upon supplies from Earth, longer missions to explore further afield become a realistic prospect.
Recycling every drop of water on the International Space Station means astronauts drinking their own urine.
Living in space has some special problems. The cramped, weightless environment makes even the simplest tasks like washing and drinking difficult. One of the biggest problems is going to the toilet; not just how to do it but what to do with the waste.
International Space Station engineers are working on a novel way to solve both these problems at once by building a recycling system that can turn the astronauts' own urine into clean drinkable water. On Earth water can be separated from the salty deposits in urine by evaporation but without gravity this process needs some help. The way they get around the problem in space is by making the system spin to create artificial gravity and allowing the water to evaporate.
This water collected from the urine is then added to all the other waste water from the space station including the shower water and condensation. It's put through filtration beds to remove all the impurities and finally heated to over 200ÂșC to kill off any bacteria or viruses.
They believe they'll then have water clean enough to drink. In fact engineers working on the project say their processed water is cleaner than tap water. To prove this assertion we tested conductivity - the less conductive the water, the purer it is. We compared the recycled water with tap water and unprocessed urine. In the test we found the processed water was about a hundred times less conductive than even the tap water.
If tests continue to go well the system will be added to the International Space Station in 2005. But more importantly it could be the first step to making communities in space self-sufficient. Once astronauts are no longer reliant upon supplies from Earth, longer missions to explore further afield become a realistic prospect.
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