A water recycling facility, designed by NASA for use by astronauts, will provide potable water to victims of the tsunami and war
News agencies, Walla news
There are many wells in Iraq, but in recent years, animal carcasses have been thrown into them, polluting the water. There are many streams in Southeast Asia, but the recent tsunami poured large amounts of salt water into them. So how do you quench the thirst of the population when there is a lot of water, but not enough to drink?
This is a question that NASA scientists, the American space agency, have been grappling with for two decades, but villagers in Iraq and the victims of the tsunami in Asia will get to taste the fruits of their labor this fall, before any astronaut in space does.
At the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, experiments have been conducted in recent years on a facility, designed for a space station, that will recycle the sweat, saliva and even urine of the astronauts and turn them into purer drinking water than can be found in any faucet.
"They just breathe and exercise, and urinate into the toilet containers, and our system takes care of everything else," says Robin Crascillo, head of the environment and life support department at the Marshall Center.
It may be two years before the recycling system - which is the size of two refrigerators - is loaded onto a space shuttle that will serve an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut who will be in space. However, smaller and simpler versions will soon be put into use on Earth.
Robert Anderson, vice president and director of the national projects of the "Care for the Children" organization, said that he began "diving" into the issue of water recycling about two years ago. the reason for that? The enormous cost of transporting water in tankers to villages in Iraq whose wells were contaminated. "I thought there must be a better way," he recalls. Eventually, Anderson became aware of the technology NASA was developing.
For example, a water recycling facility mounted on a trailer costing about 29 thousand dollars, which produces water at a cost of less than three cents per gallon, can tour the villages, and turn the polluted water in the wells into drinking water. The cost of such stationary water purification systems, equipped with packaging facilities, is about 400 thousand dollars.
Next month, Crestridge plans to launch the first plant for the production of these water processors. "By September of this year," the company says, "we hope to send over ten mobile installations to Iraq, and 12 larger units to South Asia."
The two astronauts on the station, a Russian and an American, consume water brought to the station by a Russian spacecraft. The station also has a facility that captures the moisture emitted during breathing and recycles it into a limited amount of drinking water, but recycled urine has never been used in space.
The knowledge of man and space
https://www.hayadan.org.il/BuildaGate4/general2/data_card.php?Cat=~~~115965786~~~8&SiteName=hayadan
