As we saw with Artemis 2’s toilet debacle, astronauts deal with lots of inconveniences in space. One particularly icky situation is doing—or, really, not doing—laundry. According to NASA, astronauts bring two small suitcases’ worth of clothes and sometimes wear the same underwear for up to a week—after which they get loaded onto a ship meant to burn up in the atmosphere. Not ideal. But if a new invention can live up to its promises, astronauts may no longer have to worry about running out of clean underwear. This new “laundry gun” blasts cold plasma comprised of helium, air, and water vapor, and the plasma beam caused electron-induced reactions that kill bacteria that make fabrics smelly and unsanitary. The device is still a proof-of-concept, so the plasma comes out about the size of a pencil, Gabe Xu, an aerospace engineer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told Gizmodo. If scaled up, however, it could even help astronauts sterilize spacesuits and tools before exploring extraterrestrial territories, like Mars, he said. The experiments demonstrated that the technology can “keep clothes and soft surfaces clean, at least microbially, for astronaut health,” said Xu, who presented his team’s creation at the Astrobiology Science Conference held last week.