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After eight years of experimenting with flames in space, NASA lit a fire inside a cargo spacecraft for the last time and sent its SAPPHIRE experiment on a burning re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
NASA’s Spacecraft Fire Protection Experiment, also known as SAPPHIRE, ended on Jan. 9 while flying aboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft, which burned up as it plunged into the atmosphere for its planned reentry.
A series of experiments have been going on since 2016 to understand how fire behaves in microgravity. SAPPHIRE is also designed to study how different materials spread flames in space, to inform future spacecraft and spacesuit designs, as well as protocols for handling fire emergencies. When astronauts do not have the option of leaving the spacecraft or returning to Earth. According to NASA.
“How big of a fire does it take for things to go bad for a team?” Sapphire principal investigator David Urban said in a statement, “This kind of work is done for every other structure on Earth – buildings, planes, trains, automobiles, mines, submarines, ships – but we hadn’t done this research for spacecraft until Sapphire.”
The SAPPHIRE experiments took place inside a Cygnus cargo spacecraft that launched from the International Space Station; These did not pose any threat to the crew of astronauts in low Earth orbit. The fire occurred inside an enclosure that was approximately half a meter wide, 1 meter deep and 1.3 meters long, which included a flow duct and the avionics bay.
“The sapphire flow unit is a wind tunnel. “We’re sending air through it,” Gary Ruff, project manager at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, said in a statement. “Once the test conditions are set, we run an electric current through a thin wire, and the material ignites.” Cameras inside the unit allowed the team to observe the flame, and sensors on the outside of the flow unit were designed to collect data on what was happening inside the spacecraft. The images and data were then sent to Earth for scientists to analyze. But it all ended after the last experiment was destroyed via atmospheric reentry.
The last experiment, Sapphire-VI, is scheduled to launch to the ISS in August 2023 and was designed with high oxygen concentration and low pressure in the test unit to simulate conditions inside a crewed spacecraft. The team ignited the flame on a variety of materials such as Plexiglas, cotton, Nomex, flame-resistant fiber, and low-fastness clothing (which is a blend of fiberglass and cotton) at solid flammability limits.
NASA is smart about planning for such emergencies: In 1997, Russian astronauts faced a life-threatening situation when a fire on mir space station Filled the air with smoke and cut off their access to escape pods. Thankfully, the crew was able to put out the fire before anything serious happened.
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