News / Military

NASA to make fire in space by burning cargo ship

Thursday, 17 March 2016 5:18 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 17 March 2016 5:18 PM ]

The unmanned US commercial cargo ship Cygnus is seen approaching the International Space Station.

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is planning to create the biggest man-made fire in space in order to study how fire spreads in microgravity environments.

On Earth, where gravity is present, flames have a familiar structure, with heat rising and colder, denser air falling to the base. However, without gravity as the organizing principle, flames can be very unpredictable in space.

The “large-scale fire” will be ignited inside a cargo spaceship, after delivering food, supplies and hardware to the International Space Station (ISS).

The Cygnus cargo vehicle will be launched by Orbital ATK, NASA’s commercial partner, from Florida’s John F. Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday.

Also known as Saffire, the “Spacecraft Fire Experiment I” begins two months later, when Cygnus is far enough from ISS on his way back to Earth.

During the experiment, researchers will remotely ignite a one by three-foot piece of material, a blend of fiberglass and cotton, inside a 3-by-5-foot module.

Sensors and high definition video cameras will be in place to capture the action and send the valuable data back to Earth.

Once Saffire data is collected, Cygnus will reenter the atmosphere and be destroyed in a second, and much larger, inferno.

"Saffire will be the biggest man-made fire ever in space," NASA project manager Gary Ruff said in a statement. "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."

NASA aerospace engineer Dan Dietrich had previously said that there had been some experiences in the past "where we observed fires that we didn’t think could exist, but did.”

The experiment addresses one of NASA’s greatest crew safety concerns, according to Ruff.

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