Many Americans think of Thanksgiving Day as a wonderful time to celebrate getting out of school for a long weekend and eating a great dinner. Or, maybe they think it is the start of the Christmas holiday season. This Thanksgiving, let us be thankful that our feet are planted on the ground unlike the astronauts in the space. However, a holiday feast in space is possible but looks pretty awful because they will it Turkey and green beans that are in a sealed foil pouch.
The Thanksgiving Day
Thanksgiving Day is a public holiday in America celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. This 2016, it's November 24. It originated as a harvest festival. The event that Americans commonly call the "First Thanksgiving" was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World in October 1621. This feast lasted three days, and was attended by 90 Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims. The New England colonists were accustomed to regularly celebrating "thanksgivings," days of prayer thanking God for blessings such as military victory or the end of a drought.
The Astronauts Who Celebrated On The Space
U.S. astronauts on the NASA's International Space Station (ISS) will be eating turkey this Thanksgiving Day. In a video released directly from the ISS, Robert S. Kimbrough, the mission commander, said that he and Peggy Whitson, the only other American currently on the station, will share Thanksgiving dinner with French astronaut Thomas Pesquet as well as three Russian cosmonauts. NASA will also make also possible to beam live football games up to the space station.
In another video published by the Texas A&M university Chancellor John Sharp, food scientist Ben O’Neill and former Space Shuttle astronaut turned aerospace engineering professor Bonnie Dunbar demonstrate how food for astronauts are prepared and made. The university produces NASA’s ready-to-eat meal packages in pouches. The process of heat-sealing them and running the food through a heat-processing step to sterilize makes the food has a very long shelf life.
Dunbar, as per Space, described how she would eat the astronauts' out-of-this-world turkey: heat it up in the packet, using a briefcase-like food warmer on the station; cut off the corner; and eat it out of the pouch to keep all the juices contained, or else Thanksgiving cleanup turns into quite a challenge. "Otherwise, it's in a weightless environment, floating everywhere." Over the course of her five shuttle missions, Dunbar had the chance to become very familiar with the food in space.
