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M. DHANASEKHARAN¹, M. Patel, and J. L. Kokini. (1) Department of Food Science, Rutgers University, 65 Dudley Road, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

For long-duration space travel such as a mission to Mars, there is a need to identify food processing technologies that can effectively deliver palatable and nutritious foodstuffs to the astronauts.

The objective of this work is to identify foodstuffs that can be prepared from a few crops that NASA is considering to grow on its space station to Mars and to design a food processing system that is "space friendly."

The approach taken was to obtain flowsheets to prepare the identified foods. We also conducted mass and energy balances to obtain the energy, space, and mass requirements for the unit operations. This would then be the basis for the selection of the processing equipment.

We were able to identify 81 foodstuffs that can be made from a few crops such as wheat, rice, soy, tomatoes, peanuts, and salad crops. We obtained flowsheets for all the products and obtained size and energy requirements for a crew of 10 people. Extrusion was identified as one of the important unit operations. It is required to produce nearly half of the chosen foodstuffs.

The results of this work not only are useful for long-duration space missions but can also be readily applied to process development in food industries.