NASA’s BioNutrients series of experiments is testing ways to use microorganisms to make nutrients that will be needed for human health during future long-duration deep space exploration missions. Some vital nutrients lack the shelf-life needed to span multi-year human missions, such as a mission to Mars, and may need to be produced in space to support astronaut health. To meet this need, the BioNutrients project uses a biomanufacturing approach similar to making familiar fermented foods, such as yogurt. But these foods also will include specific types and amounts of nutrients that crew will be able to consume in the future.
The first experiment in the series, BioNutrients-1, set out to assess the five-year stability and performance of a hand-held system – called a production pack – that uses an engineered microorganism, yeast, to manufacture fresh vitamins on-demand and in space. The BioNutrients-1 experiments began after multiple sets of production packs launched to the station in 2019. This collection included spare production packs as backups to be used in case an experiment needs to be re-run during the five-year study. The planned experiments concluded in January 2024 spare production packs still remaining aboard the orbiting lab and in the BioNutrients lab at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, where the ground team runs experiments in parallel to the crew operations.
Leaders at NASA’s International Space Station and Game Changing Development programs worked to coordinate the crew time needed to perform an additional BioNutrients-2 experiment using the spare packs. This extended the study’s timeline to almost six years in orbit, allowing valuable crew observations and data from the additional experiment run to be applied to a follow-on experiment, BioNutrients-3, which completed its analog astronaut experiment in April 2024, and is planned to launch to the station this year. Astronauts on the space station will freeze the sample and eventually it will be returned to Earth for analysis to see how much yeast grew and how much nutrient the experiment produced. This will help us understand how the shelf stability of the packets.
