Cygnus spacecraft.
Recently, NASA (NASA) successfully set fire on the Cygnus spacecraft (Cygnus) for space fire experiments.
Although there is no oxygen in space, there is no risk of fire, but the manned spacecraft’s capsule needs to have the air and air pressure environment to support the astronauts’ lives, once the fire, is a very dangerous disaster. In the environment of microgravity of the capsule, the way the flame spreads after the combustion of various materials is not the same as the ground environment, so such experiments are needed to understand.
NASA has been conducting these fire experiments since 2016, and most recently, the fifth experiment was conducted aboard the Cygnus spacecraft on Jan. 13 of this year.
The Cygnus spacecraft is a single-use device used to deliver resupply supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Generally, after completing their mission, the resupply spacecraft will be filled with trash from the ISS by the way, allowing them to be burned together during the return to the atmosphere.
Therefore, using these resupply spacecraft for fire experiments is a perfect choice. The Cygnus spacecraft is equipped with remote sensors that monitor various indicators such as cabin temperature, changes in carbon dioxide concentration, the composition of the air, and the way flames travel.
NASA said the experiment was the first to allow the cabin environment to exactly replicate that of a manned spacecraft. after it completed its resupply mission on Jan. 6, researchers remotely added oxygen to the Cygnus cabin, bringing it to a concentration of 34 percent and reaching 8.2 psia air pressure (one standard atmosphere is equivalent to 14.6959 psia).
After that, remote manipulation caused multiple fires in the capsule, and the oxygen inside the capsule really made the fire spread more rapidly than previous experiments had seen.
Gary A. Ruff, head of NASA’s fire prevention program, said, “The increased oxygen concentration in the environment made the flames more intense and more destructive to the spacecraft. The data from this experiment will help us better model our research and build a space fire prevention strategy.”
NASA is already preparing for a sixth experiment. The next one will add detection of fire points, explosion monitoring, and site cleanup after fire suppression.
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