Baking a cookie is a simple process for everyone. But when it comes to baking cookies in microgravity, it is not that simple and easy as one thinks. For the first time, astronauts in the International Space Station baked cookies in microgravity.
Despite baking delicious and colourful cookies in the space station, they were not allowed to taste them as they were made as part of an experiment.
The Double Tree Cookies will remain sealed in the space station to be returned to the earth for analysis. The microgravity atmosphere in the space station is not good for baking cookies and also complicates its preparation. However, the cookies were baked in a newly developed space oven that was sent to the space station in November. The oven was cylindrical in shape and blue in colour. It was produced by New York based Startup Zero G Kitchen and space technology developer Nanoracks.
The space oven functions differently from the oven used on Earth. In the generally used ovens, fans are used to circulate the air all round the box that causes the cookies to heat up evenly and expand upwards. But in Space Oven there is no Up. As such the space oven is lined with heaters on every side to bring down the effects of Zero Gravity.
Luca Parmitano, European Space Agency astronaut, who had baked the cookies in the space station, said that the cookies were now sealed and kept to be sent back to the Earth. He said that the first two cookies were baked doughy and the last two were nice and brown.
