Students in Australia are making their own yogurt in a space experiment.
40 students from across Victoria are participating in a program that will deliver yoghurt cultures to the International Space Station on Tuesday, via a SpaceX rocket.
The rocket, a Falcon 9, is set to launch at 5.36am US eastern time on Tuesday, just after 9pm Australian eastern time.
A group of students at an independent high school in Australia are working with researchers at Swinburne University to study the effects of microgravity onbacteria. They want to make sure that astronauts can make their own yogurt.
The astronauts on the International Space Station will be able to thaw the frozen milk and strains of good bacteria in the space station.
Aysel, who just completed year 10 at Haileybury, said she was excited to be sending an experiment to space.
We could only imagine what it would be like to go to the International Space Station.
The International Space Station will receive the vials. The University of Technology.
The team is sending 20 vials to study how long it takes for a full cream cow's milk or soy milk yoghurt to ferment.
After 1.5 months, the samples will return to Australia.
The students plan to analyse the yoghurts they make.
The goal of the experiment was to determine which yoghurt was more healthy and which was less, as well as how we did on Earth, according to a fellow student.
Sgroi said that they might get to taste it. She noted that the temperature inside the space station is cooler than the 37 degree temperature that yogurt is usually cultured at.
If astronauts didn't have enough nutrition, that would cause an issue.
Students participating in the Space Youth Innovation Challenge will send more than a dozen more bottles of milk and one or multiple strains ofbacteria to the International Space Station.
Dr Sara Webb, the co-ordinator of the Swinburne Youth Space Innovation Challenge, said that the behavior ofbacteria was altered by microgravity.
The students wanted to find out if the yoghurt produced in space was as good as the dairy products on Earth. She said that the strains ofbacteria might fare better than on Earth, citing fewer mutations in their DNA or faster replication as examples.
It would be healthy to send Joe Blow to Mars with some frozenbacteria and a bit of milk and he could make his own yogurt, but it wouldn't be technically viable in space.
