Posted on 01/13/2021 3:24:25 PM PST by BenLurkin
The International Space Station bid adieu on Tuesday to 12 bottles of Bordeaux wine and hundreds of snippets of grapevines that spent a year orbiting the world in the name of science.
The wine and vines – and thousands of pounds of other gear and research, including mice – will splashdown onboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule on Wednesday night in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tampa.
None of the bottles will be opened until the end of February. That’s when Space Cargo Unlimited, the company behind the experiments, will pop open a bottle or two for a tasting in Bordeaux by some of France’s top connoisseurs. Months of chemical testing will follow. Researchers are eager to see how space altered the sedimentation and bubbles.
Agricultural science was the primary objective, said Nicolas Gaume, the company’s CEO and co-founder, although he admits it will be fun to sample the wine.
The wine hitched a ride to the space station in November 2019 aboard a Northrop Grumman supply ship. The 320 merlot and cabernet sauvignon vine snippets, called canes in the grape-growing business, were launched by SpaceX last March.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
There can’t be sedimentation in a near-zero gravity environment. There’s no need to test that.
Be interesting to see the effect of the sub-atomic particles that, lightly, permeate everything in orbit though.
(Shame that all the bottles are being returned. Apollo and other early astronauts would never have permitted that!)
Bottle Shock?
“Wine? What wine? Oh, man, I gotta pee!”
Of course the wine will not have aged a year.
Coming to a TV station soon, a new show, “Drunks In Space”.
If they could land on the moon with it, they’d have plenty of cheese
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