- Jul 20, 2016
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- 20,209
As you can imagine, there are no washers and dryers in space. After awhile, clothes can get pretty ripe, and all the astronauts can do is put on fresh ones and place the old ones in the trash that gets incinerated on re-entry.
Astronaut Don Pettit, a University of Arizona College of Engineering alumnus, wore the same pair of shorts for months at a time while living on the International Space Station because doing laundry was not an option.
When clothes got too dirty, Pettit and his crewmates stored them onboard until they could be thrown out — launched with other debris on a spacecraft and incinerated upon entering Earth's atmosphere.
Back on the UA's main campus, undergraduate research assistant Christina Morrison wants to make life more comfortable for astronauts such as Pettit by making clothes stay cleaner for longer in space.
Clothes add a lot of weight to spacecraft, and water is too precious to be used for cleaning them. So Morrison's goal is to find a way for astronauts to do laundry in space without using water. The research is funded by a NASA Space Grant.
Silver and hydrogen peroxide are both known germ-fighters, and research has shown they become an even stronger disinfectant when combined and applied to water.
Working with UA professor of microbiology Charles Gerba, Morrison has for the first time demonstrated that this synergistic effect works on textiles, too.
Morrison and Gerba applied low concentrations of hydrogen peroxide to swatches of antimicrobial socks embroidered with silver-ion threads and exposed the treated material to Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium often found in the nose and on the skin. The researchers compared how the germs fared on these swatches versus how they did on untreated antimicrobial material and on regular socks.
Within an hour, they were able to achieve a nearly 5-log reduction, or about 99.999 percent, of the bacteria on treated antimicrobial socks.
https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/doing-laundry-outer-space-shes-working-solution
Astronaut Don Pettit, a University of Arizona College of Engineering alumnus, wore the same pair of shorts for months at a time while living on the International Space Station because doing laundry was not an option.
When clothes got too dirty, Pettit and his crewmates stored them onboard until they could be thrown out — launched with other debris on a spacecraft and incinerated upon entering Earth's atmosphere.
Back on the UA's main campus, undergraduate research assistant Christina Morrison wants to make life more comfortable for astronauts such as Pettit by making clothes stay cleaner for longer in space.
Clothes add a lot of weight to spacecraft, and water is too precious to be used for cleaning them. So Morrison's goal is to find a way for astronauts to do laundry in space without using water. The research is funded by a NASA Space Grant.
Silver and hydrogen peroxide are both known germ-fighters, and research has shown they become an even stronger disinfectant when combined and applied to water.
Working with UA professor of microbiology Charles Gerba, Morrison has for the first time demonstrated that this synergistic effect works on textiles, too.
Morrison and Gerba applied low concentrations of hydrogen peroxide to swatches of antimicrobial socks embroidered with silver-ion threads and exposed the treated material to Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium often found in the nose and on the skin. The researchers compared how the germs fared on these swatches versus how they did on untreated antimicrobial material and on regular socks.
Within an hour, they were able to achieve a nearly 5-log reduction, or about 99.999 percent, of the bacteria on treated antimicrobial socks.
https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/doing-laundry-outer-space-shes-working-solution
