NASA recently set off the largest fire ever in space — but don’t worry, it’s for astronauts’ own safety.
It’s part of the Spacecraft Fire Experiment-1, also called Saffire-1 (short for safe fire), a project designed to learn more about what might happen if a large fire were to break out in a microgravity environment — like the inside of a space station.
“If something bad happens in space, you can’t just leave the room and wait for someone to take care of it,” NASA aerospace engineer Gary Ruff told Wired. “If a fire starts, you have to be able to detect it, put it out, return all of your equipment to the way it was, and continue on your mission.”
The experiment was conducted inside a specially designed chamber on board an unmanned Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo vehicle, a safe distance away from the International Space Station.
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Scientists set a strip of cotton-fibreglass about 40 centimetres-by-one metre wide and observed how it burned on June 14. It burned for about eight minutes, moving slowly from one end of the flammable material to the other.
It’s the largest fire set in space for an experiment. Previous tests involved igniting material only about the size of a playing card.
Fire spreads differently in microgravity
Fire on the earth rises and flickers, but in microgravity a lit flame looks more like a blob. On a spacecraft, a fire will likely only travel in the direction of the airflow dictated by its ventilation system. In other words, flames and smoke might travel inside the ventilation system
And because flames and smoke don’t travel upwards like they do on Earth, more thought has to be taken into where to place smoke detectors.
The fire in the experiment was able to move because the test chamber included a flow duct that simulated the air flow inside a space station.
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The Cygnus spent an additional six days in space, transmitting data to engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
The project’s team is expected to spend the next few weeks to analyse the data they’ve gathered so far. Two more Saffire experiments are planned for later this year, making similar tests with different-sized flammable materials.