The six-astronaut crew of NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis packed up a bunch of cold bags with biological specimens fresh from science freezer aboard the International Space Station (ISS) today.

While the cold bags now hold a bunch of microbes, bacteria and other little crawlies – which scientists will pore over to learn how genetic changes occur in living organisms in a space environment as part of their POEMS experiment – they were filled with something else when Atlantis rocketed towards the ISS last week.

What was that you ask?

Good old-fashioned ice cream, NASA says.

Apparently, STS-115 commander Brent Jett and his Atlantis crewmates picked up a batch of Blue Bell ice cream cups to fill the apparently empty cold bags as a treat for the space station’s Expedition 13 crew.

NASA spokesman James Hartsfield here at the Johnson Space Center tells me that the Atlantis crew picked up the ice cream at a local Florida store near the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.