What would happen if astronauts travelling to Mars suddenly had to deal with a fire breaking out in their spacecraft? NASA is hoping that an experiment set to launch along with Tuesday’s International Space Station (ISS) resupply mission will provide the answer.
As CBS News and USA Today explained late last week, the US space agency is planning to internationally start a fire on the Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo craft that is delivering provisions, tools, and equipment to the orbiting facility. The fire, which will be set after the vehicle leaves the ISS, is part of NASA’s new Spacecraft Fire Experiment (Saffire) program.
The Saffire project, an international collaboration of institutions and government agencies, is designed to help scientists understand how flames will spread in microgravity during a long-duration spaceflight. This week’s fire is the first of three such experiments planned, all of which will be controlled remotely from Orbital’s Dulles, Virginia-based control center.
“NASA’s objective is to reduce the risk of long-duration exploration missions,” Jason Crusan, director of Advanced Exploration Systems for NASA, said in a statement, “and a spacecraft fire is one of the biggest concerns for NASA and the international space exploration community.”
The plan is to light what Dan Tani, Orbital’s senior director of mission and cargo operations, told USA Today what will be “a relatively large-scale fire” in a special 3×5 module which will remain on the Cygnus after all other supplies are offloaded to the station. The fire will then be ignited on the vehicle’s return trip to Earth, and the module will collect data on the fire’s behavior.
Experiments will work to improve fire safety for long-distance missions
NASA explained that the Saffire module is divided into two sides. On one side is an avionics bay filled with sensors, high definition video cameras, and signal processing equipment. On the other side is the gear required to ignite the large frame, as well as fabrics and other materials designed to burn in the fire, including a 16×37-inch piece of SIBAL cloth.
SIBAL cloth, a blend of fiberglass and cotton, was selected for use in the experiment because it has already been studied in smaller-scale microgravity combustion experiments, the agency said. It will be burned from the bottom so that researchers can monitor how the flame spreads. Should it simply extinguish itself, the scientists will them light it from the top to monitor its behavior as the flames move in opposition to the airflow in the module.
“Saffire will be the biggest man-made fire ever in space,” said Gary A. Ruff, NASA’s Spacecraft Fire Safety Demonstration project manager. “Currently, we can only conduct small combustion experiments in the microgravity environment of the space station. Saffire will allow us to safely burn larger samples of material without added risk to the station or its crew. Using the Cygnus cargo vehicle to host Saffire offers a unique opportunity to conduct beneficial spacecraft fire safety research using existing mission profiles.”
“Fire onboard a spacecraft is one of the greatest fears that astronauts have. If there is a fire onboard a spacecraft they can’t go outside, they can’t open the windows, they can’t call the fire department, they can’t use water to extinguish the flames. They have to resort to other methods,” Derrick Pitts, Chief Astronomer at the Franklin Institute, told CBS News. “In zero gravity, everything behaves differently – including flame. So it’s best to understand how flame behaves and what are the best ways to extinguish flame in zero-G.”
All three Saffire experiments are scheduled to be conducted before the end of the year. Saffire-II will assess oxygen flammability thresholds using 2 inch wide by 12 inch long samples when it is launched later on this year. It will be followed by Saffire-III, which will also be used to assess a large-scale microgravity fire, according to NASA.
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Image credit: NASA
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