The lack of oxygen in space means that a fire in a spaceship is not usually a problem for long. As soon as the outer cover is opened, all the air escapes and the fire quickly extinguished.
But that’s not much consolation if you’re an astronaut, and you need to breathe. So space agencies around the world tend to make a great effort to prevent fires in the first place. Except for NASA, which started fires on purpose.
Glenn Research Center NASA in Cleveland, Ohio, was commissioned to discover a little more about what happens when a spacecraft is on fire.
therefore, he sets fire to one. Specifically, a ship orbital cargo ATK Cygnus who had just finished a supply mission to the International Space Station.
After their supplies were unloaded and replaced with waste from the ISS, the capsule was thrown It drifts and the experiment began. Inside the box, the engineers on the surface torched a “sample material” unspecified, while captured images and data from multiple sensors.
The burning ship went around the Earth for eight days before it burns completely (in the atmosphere, rather than their fire on board). In the coming weeks, researchers at Glenn and ten other government agencies and international universities will study the data carefully.
What are particularly interested in how fire behaves is in microgravity. On Earth, it has a characteristic form called because flammable gases become lighter than the surrounding air. In orbit, where gravity is much lower, that does not happen to the same degree.
“The success of this experiment opens the door to future large combustion experiments in microgravity environment,” said Gary A . Ruff, Demonstration Project manager of NASA spacecraft fire safety
More information:. arstechnica
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