Exhilarating' experiment: Australian students send bacteria into space to brew yoghurt | Science - ASMI Education

Australian high school students are sending bacteria into space in an experiment to make their own yogurt.

In collaboration with Swinburne University of Technology, 40 students from across Victoria are participating in a program that brings yogurt farms to the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday, via a SpaceX rocket.

The rocket, Falcon 9, is scheduled to launch at 5.06 a.m. EDT on Tuesday – after 9 p.m. EST – from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A team of six students at Haileybury, an independent secondary school in Melbourne, is working with Swinburne researchers to study the effects of microgravity on bacteria. They hope to improve the conditions under which astronauts can make yogurt themselves.

A total of 36 vials will be sent into space, containing frozen milk and strains of yogurt-producing “good” bacteria, which will be thawed by astronauts on the International Space Station.

Aysel Sapukotana, who has just completed his 10th year at Haileybury, said it was “exhilarating” to send an experiment into space.

“Something we really put in the hard work to go to the International Space Station – that was previously something … we could only really imagine,” she said.

Haileybury’s team is sending out 20 bottles to study what kind of yogurt would be produced depending on the type of milk used – either whole cow’s milk or soy milk – and how long it fermented – either 24, 48 or 72 hours.

The samples will return to Australia about 1.5 months after they were first expelled.

Sapukutana said the students plan to analyze the viscosity, nutrients and lactic acid content of the resulting yogurt.

The goal of the experiment was to identify “yogurt that ended up being more nutritious, and also compare that to the control we did on the ground,” said Hailiberry School’s 16-year-old fellow student Kiara Sgroe.

“We might even taste it, which is very exciting,” Sgroy said. She noted that the temperature inside the International Space Station, about 23 degrees Celsius, is much cooler than 37 degrees Celsius or warmer than usually yoghurt.

“If the astronauts were eating this and they didn’t have enough proteins and nutrients, it would lead to a small problem,” Sapukutana added.

Separately, students across Victoria participating in the Swinburne Youth Innovation Challenge will send another 16 vials to the International Space Station, containing different combinations of milk and one or several bacterial strains.

Dr Sarah Webb, coordinator of the Swinburne Youth Space Innovation Challenge, said previous International Space Station experiments had shown that the behavior of bacteria had been altered by microgravity.

Webb said the students had hoped to find that milk produced in space was just as nutritious as dairy grown on Earth. “We might see that the actual strains of bacteria were doing better than they were on Earth,” she said, citing fewer mutations in their DNA or faster reproduction as examples.

“Hopefully we’ll be able to say, ‘Yes, not only is yogurt viable in space – so technically you could send Joe Blow to Mars with some frozen bacteria and a pint of milk and he could make his own yogurt – but he might be healthy.'” “