Space Cookies-First food to be baked in space in a first-of-its-kind experiment by astronauts
- A special oven working in zero gravity for this experiment was sent to the ISS in December last year.
- Italian astronauts prepared 5 cookies by baking the dough made by Hilton Hotel in the oven.
HOUSTON: Astronauts make cookies, chocolate and chips at the International Space Station for the first time. They were last sent to the special ISS in December to cook there. This oven works in zero gravity. It took two hours longer to cook cookies than on Earth. It has been used by Italian astronaut Lusa Paramitano.
They have prepared 5 cookies by baking the dough of raw food material made by Hilton Hotel in the oven. Cookies are similar to cookies made on earth. No one has tasted these cookies, so nothing can be said about how it is made. The astronauts currently sent these cookies to Earth, which are safe in the Houston Lab.
Stored in a baking pouch
Cookies are stored in a private baking pouch as a SpaceX capsule at a frozen lab in Houston. This pouch is placed in a space flight container. According to media reports, Nanorax, which manufactures the Zero Gravity Oven, estimated that it would take longer than usual to bake food materials sent from Earth for the first time into space, but this time was not more than just 2 hours. It was built in November by Nanorax, located near NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Italian astronaut did baking
Lusa Paramitano baked cookies in December. He baked a total of five biscuits one by one. It took 25 minutes to bake the first cookies. It was baked at 300 Fahrenheit. However, it was not perfect baking. It took twice as long to bake the second-third cookie as it was not fully baked. In this sequence, the fourth-fifth cookie baked properly, which was claimed to be edible. It was baked for over two hours.
Tweeting from space in December, Ms Koch, a Nasa astronaut, wrote about making the cookies in space:
“While we have initial visual and scent feedback from the crew aboard the ISS, we’re excited to dive into fully understanding the baking results,” said Mary Murphy, senior internal payloads manager at NanoRacks.
