Blog

As far as we know, food doesn’t exist naturally in space. We have to bring it with us if we want to explore the final frontier. One of the oldest and most common types of food on planet Earth is seafood, yet we know surprisingly little about how aquatic animals would react to the microgravity environment they would experience in space. A new paper by researchers at Japan’s Okayama University of Science, which was recently published in Microgravity Science and Technology, hopes to tackle that question. It used a novel way to simulate microgravity to watch how crustaceans would react to the space environment, and found that they could likely be good candidates as part of a future space food chain.

Most microgravity experiments on Earth take place in drop chambers or parabolic flights — both of which only offer a few seconds of true “microgravity”, and aren’t suitable for longer duration testing. The International Space Station offers an alternative, but is extremely expensive and has very limited space to run additional experiments. So the researchers turned to an alternative tool — the clinostat.

These specialized chambers rapidly change the orientation their contents are subjected to, varying the gravity field they experience and mimicking at least some of the effects of microgravity. They rotate in such a way that the combination of gravity and centrifugal force will eventually come out to essentially zero over a period of time. These machines work well for single-celled organisms and plants. But they’re not as effective for complex animals.