KSC-2012-6321

KSC-2012-6321 – CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Anne Caraccio works with an experimental reactor as part of the trash-to-gas project at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A group of six researchers at Kennedy and groups from NASA centers in Ohio, California and Texas wrote in a recent paper that the current methods of handling trash – either carrying it along on the round trip through space or gathering it into an expendable module and burning it up in Earth's atmosphere – are not suitable answers for missions that go beyond Earth orbit or even past the moon. Working in a laboratory at Kennedy, Hintze's team built an 80-pound device that looks like a three-foot-long metal pipe to test theories about incinerating a variety of trash ranging from used clothes to uneaten food. The reactor holds more than three quarts of material and burns at about 1,000 degrees F, about twice the maximum temperature of an average household oven. It's expected to take astronauts four hours to burn a day's worth of trash from a crew of four. During the course of a year in space – one half the length of time a mission to Mars is expected to take – trash processing for a crew of four would create about 2,200 pounds of methane fuel, enough to power a launch from the lunar surface, Hintze said. Photo credit: NASA/Dmitri Gerondidakis