REAL LIFE NEWS: NASA WANTS TO LIGHT A FIRE IN SPACE
by Hazed
You would think that one of the things you really want to avoid when you’re in a spaceship is fire – but NASA wants to ignite a blaze on one of its ISS resupply mission capsules.
The plan is to study how fire behaves in a zero-gravity environment. Given that fire safety methods used by spaceship designers are based on knowledge of what fire does on Earth, it seems like a good idea to find out the differences when there is no gravity.
The next ship heading to the ISS under remote control to take supplies to the astronauts will contain instruments to “measure flame growth, oxygen use and more, improving understanding of fire growth in microgravity and safeguarding future space missions.” Setting fire to a returning capsule poses no safety hazard since it will burn up when it hits Earth’s atmosphere anyway.
The plan that NASA has devised, with the help of the European Space Agency, is to burn “a panel of thin material approximately 0.4 m wide by 1.0 m long.” The material will be in a special box and it will be ignited by a radio signal that heats a wire on the panel, once the craft is well away from the ISS.
This experiment will be followed by two more later this year.