As most people, astronauts also like to enjoy a cup of coffee during breakfast. However, due to the lack of gravity, the process of making and drinking coffee on the International Space Station (ISS) is quite different from the usual conditions on Earth.
Classic cappuccino, meet the space cup. ☕🤝
This demo shows the Capillary Beverage investigation which studies the process of drinking from specially designed Space Cups that use fluid dynamics to mimic the effect of gravity. https://t.co/xFGFTva2Bw pic.twitter.com/M7TQmIwlrC
— ISS Research (@ISS_Research) March 2, 2023
NASA recently released a video showing astronauts aboard the ISS enjoying their daily dose of coffee. To make the drink, they use a special water dispensing system that gets the liquid from recycled waste and moisture collected from the air. When the water is hot, they connect a plastic bag of freeze-dried coffee to a device that fills it with hot water. The astronauts then drink it through a straw.
However, astronaut Don Pettit, who was on the ISS in 2008, decided to get rid of the bags. He invented a so-called weightlessness cup, making it from a piece of plastic from his Flight Data File mission book. This cup utilizes the surface tension of liquid to hold your drink in microgravity. The design was later improved, and the Zero Gravity cup is now the first patented product invented in space.
Knowing about coffee in orbit, many also become curious about how astronauts handle their physiological needs in space. Astronauts answer this question, which is one of the most popular, in the same video. However, you can learn about hygiene procedures in weightlessness in our material.
We previously reported on how microgravity improved beer fermentation beyond Earth.
According to digitaltrends.com
