NASA has announced that they have been able to make 98% water from pee in a recent breakthrough. This was attained by astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) through an advanced technology that recycles the sweat and urine of astronauts into water, and it holds a huge potential for future long interplanetary missions.
According to NASA, each crew member on board the ISS needs one gallon of water everyday for drinking, preparing food and other hygiene purposes. This is recovered by a system called life support which is used to recycle consumables like food, air and water for further use in space.
With this new development astronauts will be able to spend more and more time in space to accomplish long space missions.
Christopher Brown, who is part of the team at Johnson Space Center that manages life support systems on the ISS, said, “This is a very important step forward in the evolution of life support systems. Let’s say you launch with 100 pounds of water. You lose two pounds of that, and the other 98% just keeps going around and around. Keeping that running is a pretty awesome achievement.”
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