NASA is currently in the process of developing special food that will one day be used on manned-trips to Mars.
The food (which can be seen in the video below) is currently being developed for use on the Orion Spacecraft, which is designed to take astronauts beyond low Earth orbit. Orion's upcoming trip, Exploration Mission 2, will take its crew around the Earth's moon "without being attached to any habitation module," explains Orion Crew Support Equipment System Manager Jessica Vos.
"In order to complete that mission," Vos says, "we need to pack all the food that we need for four crew for, like, 10 to 14 days. So that's quite a bit of mass and volume that we're talking about." In order to combat that, she continues, NASA's Space Food Systems Laboratory has developed meal replacement bars meant to be low in mass, but high in caloric density.
"We have the banana nut bar, orange cranberry bar, ginger vanilla bar, and barbecue nut bar," NASA Food Scientist Takiyah Sirmons shows off in the video. "Each are totaling about 700 to 800 calories. So it's a huge meal replacement." NASA is currently carrying out human studies to see how often astronauts will need to eat the bars during missions, she says.
NASA is currently hoping to launch Exploration Mission 2 sometime between 2021 and 2023.
While no manned-trip to Mars has been formally announced yet by NASA, as the Orion Spacecraft was developed with the end goal of sending human beings to the Red Planet, this may be our first glimpse into some of the resources necessary to make the trip a reality. If successful, maybe in a few decades we will have humans actually living on Mars, as Elon Musk is currently planning for.
Back in August, in preparation for a trip to our neighboring planet, NASA astronauts wrapped up spending a year pretending to be on Mars.
Blake Hester is a KY-based writer. Follow him on Twitter @metallicaisrad.
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