The following frontier for fire-in-space experiments often is the moon.
The longtime leader of fireside experiments on a personal International Space Station (ISS) cargo vehicle says he’s applied to do similar work on a robotic moon lander for NASA’s Artemis program, which goals to land people and payloads on the lunar surface in the subsequent few years.
“We actually should be on the lunar surface to get long duration,” David Urban, fire investigator and chief of the low-gravity exploration technology branch at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio, said in a press conference on Tuesday (July 18).
Urban stressed that the concept remains to be within the proposal stage. But he hopes to review fire-safety practices on a NASA-funded Industrial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) robotic moon vehicle. Experiments aboard an Orion astronaut vehicle or NASA’s planned lunar Gateway space station, he said, couldn’t last nearly as long.
Urban leads the Spacecraft Fire Experiment-VI (Saffire-VI) aboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus freighter, which can launch no sooner than Aug. 1 at 8:30 p.m. EDT (0030 GMT Aug. 2) atop an Antares rocket.
The Cygnus will fly to the ISS with a collection of science gear and supplies from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. You’ll be able to watch the liftoff live here at Space.com, via NASA Television, when the time comes.
Cygnus will remain docked on the space station for roughly 90 days before departing with the fiery experiment on board, en path to its planned destruction in Earth’s atmosphere. Just like the five experiments before it, Saffire-VI will only activate when Cygnus is at a protected distance from the ISS.
The Saffire series has been using Cygnus spacecraft to see how flame grows in material utilized in crew cabins, to check NASA’s material selection processes. (The agency, naturally, wants to maintain its astronauts as protected as possible during flight.)
“We wish to lift the oxygen concentration of the spacecraft to get near the exploration atmospheres,” Urban said of the brand new experiment, which can require extra bottles of compressed oxygen to attain that goal.
Experimenters may even test a brand new “extinguishing strategy” for the materials used “to make certain there’s loads of time (for the fireplace) to exit,” Urban said. This could improve future space safety, he added.
Saffire experiments generally use large samples as much as roughly 40 inches (100 centimeters) across, a luxury that is possible because Cygnus carries no astronauts. Video from Saffire is shipped to Earth after the tests are finished, which doesn’t allow for real-time adjustments to the experiments, Paul Ferkul, SoFIE project scientist at NASA Glenn, previously told Space.com via e-mail.
SoFIE (Solid Fuel Ignition and Extinction) is one other fire investigation; it’s installed within the Combustion Investigation Rack, positioned on the ISS’s Destiny module. Unlike Saffire, SoFIE investigators can change parameters resembling ignition aspects, oxygen, pressure, radiant heating and flow speed in the course of the experiment. But SoFIE uses smaller samples, measuring roughly 4 inches to 12 inches (10 to 30 cm) long, for crew safety reasons.
Ferkul has said his team’s experiment may even be helpful for future moon habitats. “Understanding how flames spread and the way materials burn in several environments is crucial for the security of future astronauts,” he noted in a 2022 NASA press release.
Other ISS space-borne fire experiments included the Flame Extinguishment Experiment, or FLEX (which partly was how oxygen influences combustion) and the Advanced Combustion via Microgravity Experiments (ACME), which aimed to scale back emissions from combustion.
NASA’s Artemis program goals to place an astronaut crew on the lunar surface during Artemis 3, now scheduled to launch in 2025 or 2026 depending on progress with SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft, which might be the mission’s lander. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is investigating Starship’s launch attempt in April that rained concrete and other debris across the launch site in coastal Texas.
The Artemis 1 mission flew across the moon uncrewed in late 2022 on a successful test of Orion and NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. Artemis 2 will send 4 astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Jeremy Hansen — across the moon no sooner than November 2024.
NASA and its international Artemis partners also plan to place scientific payloads, landers and rovers on the moon’s surface via the CLPS program.
Other experiments and payloads launching to the ISS aboard the Cygnus NG-19 mission on Aug. 1 include:
- Neuronix, an ISS National Lab experiment that “demonstrates the formation of 3D neuron cell cultures in microgravity, and tests a neuron-specific gene therapy,” in keeping with NASA officials. Results may help develop drugs or other therapies for people with paralysis and neurological diseases, resembling Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
- Multi Needle Langmuir Probe a European Space Agency experiment that “monitors plasma densities within the ionosphere — where Earth’s atmosphere meets space.” The outcomes may improve accuracy for GPS systems, which may be disturbed by concentrations of the superheated gas induced by solar activity.
- Exploration PWD, a water-sanitation processor that “uses advanced water sanitization and microbial growth reduction methods, and dispenses hot water.”
- I-Space Essay, a JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) memory card “that comprises digital works created by students, resembling pictures and poetry, to the space station.” Greater than 13,000 students in 74 schools participated..