- Six Chinese astronauts cooked barbecue aboard Tiangong space station using a new oven
- The oven operates smokelessly without straining the space station's power grid
- Cooking in microgravity required unique heating and fume management solutions
Six Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station have become the first humans to cook and enjoy a barbecue in space. In a video released by the Astronaut Center of China (ACC), the astronauts of the Shenzhou 20 and Shenzhou 21 missions used a newly delivered oven to cook the food, as per a report in Space.com. The development marks the first time an oven suitable for use in microgravity has been deployed aboard a space station.
The roasted chicken wings were cooked in 28 minutes in the space station's microgravity environment, where cooking any kind of food is a major challenge. According to Chinese state media, the oven operates without stressing Tiangong's power grid and is designed to provide consistent and smokeless baking conditions.
In the video, the crew is seen placing the chicken wings in a specially-made grill cage and placing it in a small, cabinet-like compartment in the space station's wall.
"Unlike what happens on Earth, where the air is churning around in the oven, the necessary process called convection just doesn't occur in space. Therefore, engineers needed to work out a unique way to heat the food and handle the cooking fumes, while also ensuring the safety of crew members," Wang Yanan, chief editor of Aerospace Knowledge magazine, was quoted as saying by China Daily.
The oven's maximum temperature was also raised from 100C to 190C, allowing astronauts to roast and bake instead of merely warming prepackaged meals.
Watch The Video Here:
Prior to the Chinese astronauts, the International Space Station (ISS) tested a prototype oven built by NanoRacks and Zero G Kitchen in a first-of-its-kind experiment in 2020. Five chocolate chip cookies were baked in orbit, marking the first food baked in space. Three of these cookies baked in orbit were later returned to Earth aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
The Shenzhou 21 crew launched to Tiangong on October 31 and will remain aboard Tiangong for roughly six months. The trio is relieving the Shenzhou 20 astronauts, who have been living aboard the station since April and will return to Earth on November 5.
