US student team aim to brew beer on the Moon, Indian spacecraft may carry the canister

“Team Original Gravity”is one of the 25 finalists partaking in the Lab2Moon competition held by Team Indus.

A team of Students from the University of California, San Diego is planning to brew beer on the moon for the first time and plans to send a canister aboard an Indian lunar lander that is set to blast off later in 2017.

The group of engineering students, which calls itself “Team Original Gravity”, is one of the 25 finalists partaking in the Lab2Moon competition held by Team Indus, which is one of the four organizations contracted to send a spacecraft to the moon on December 28 this year as part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE challenge.

Researchers said that the experiment will test the viability of yeast fermentation on the surface of moon.

“The idea started out with a few laughs among a group of friends. We all appreciate the craft of beer, and some of us own our own home-brewing kits. When we heard that there was an opportunity to design an experiment that would go up on India’s moonlander, we thought we could combine our hobby with the competition by focusing on the viability of yeast in outer space,” team member Neeki Ashari said in a statement.

The mechanical lead for the team Srivaths Kalyan said that the canister is designed based on actual fermenters.

“It contains three compartments – the top will be filled with the unfermented beer, the second will contain yeast,” said Kalyan. “When the rover lands on the Moon with our experiment, a valve will open between the two compartments, allowing the two to mix… When the yeast has done its job, a second valve opens and the yeast sink to the bottom, separate from fermented beer.”

An International jury will evaluate the experiments in March when teams fly to Bengaluru to showcase their prototype.