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NASA Will Intentionally Burn Unmanned Orbiting Craft In Space (phys.org)
An anonymous reader writes from an article on Phys.org: NASA said it will test the effects of a large fire in space by setting off a blaze inside an orbiting unmanned space craft. NASA has set off tiny controlled fires in space in the past, but never tested how large flames react inside a space capsule in space. The goal is to measure the size of the flames, how quickly they spread, the heat output, and how much gas is emitted. The results of this experiment, dubbed Saffire-1, will determine how much fire resistance is needed in the ultra-light material used in the spacecraft and the astronaut's gear. It will also help NASA build better fire detection and suppression systems for their spaceships, and study how microgravity and limited amounts of oxygen affect the size of the flames.
The goal is to measure the size of the flames, how quickly they spread, the heat output, and how much gas is emitted.
Said every pyro ever.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Inside the craft....
They will be simulating a manned atmosphere inside the craft before igniting it.
They invented a whole new concept called the "inside". This craft will be equipped with one such feature. It will contain oxygen.
This sounds like one of the more useful things I've ever heard nasa do.
Ummm, you're aware that our atmosphere touches space, right?
Burning an orbiting spacecraft inside an orbiting spacecraft?
You are missing something here. It is simply the orbiting spacecraft.... catching fire on the inside of that same spacecraft.... in space!
It is like a Beowulf Cluster of Linux servers........ in space!
That is why this is so impressive..... in space!
Haven't you seen Star Wars? Just because you're in a vacuum doesn't mean you can't have huge fireballs and thunderous explosions.
#DeleteChrome
I spent a year or so working on fire detection for the Orion project, which was, at the time, sending folks to the moon. Fire in space is an incredibly arcane subject, with almost nothing known. On Earth, convection is everything, but in space, there is no gravity to drive convection. In other words, hot air doesn't rise. So flames do really weird, unexpected, unintuitive things.
I actually think you could have some really really cool looking massive fireballs in space. If you have a flammable mixture being ejected from a central point and ignition starts from the centre point fractionally after the start of the ejection you would have two expanding fronts. The first would be what ever the flammable mix is, the second is the ignition front chasing it. While the mixture remains dense enough for ignition to spread it would look really really cool.
Obviously flammable mix in a vacuum would require oxygen in some form. I wonder what burning potassium Chlorate would look like in space.
They are setting off the fire inside a box inside the spacecraft. They are storing the data during the burn and transmitting it after the burn, so clearly they expect the spacecraft to survive.
Now that's a claim not many people can make!
I've read a bit about how it behaves in the past and looked at some amazing videos. Everything I saw had almost no visible flame. I really wonder what the heat signature would be like as it doesn't look concentrated at all.
We are now intentionally polluting space.
Now?
http://pics-about-space.com/nasa-space-junk?p=1
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Last time I checked 100% of the junk in orbit got there intentionally, including a lot of nuclear reactors and stuff you should actually care about.
Fire and balls are two words you don't want to be used in a sentence describing your pants.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
From TFA, that appears to be exactly the plan.
Only, don't you suppose it is a good idea to place this capsule and run this experiment on board an unmanned spacecraft? So if something goes terribly wrong, you don't have an exploding capsule on board a manned spacecraft such as a Soyuz ferry or the International Space Station?
We either have a fire on board or Harold is breathing heavily again, either way I've got a problem.
It's basically been a 'we know it's bad, so we do everything we can to prevent it' type of thing. They're getting to the point where they can afford to risk a craft to see exactly how bad.
Some small scale experiments have been done in the past, of course. And one or two 'uncontrolled experiments' as well...
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I just hope they do this in the memory of Grissom, White, and Chaffee. That was one of my first early childhood scars.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Not when internal over-pressure pops the seams (just look at how quickly the Apollo 1 fire happened).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Fire and balls are two words you don't want to be used in a sentence describing your pants.
Jack nimble, jack be quick,
Jack jump over the candle stick
Goodness gracious, great balls of fire.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
So instead of "stop, drop and roll", it's presumably "stand perfectly still so the flames will starve quickly"?
On the other hand, since astronauts aren't routinely passing out in a cloud of their own exhaled CO2, I guess there's enough forced air circulation to keep the flames going more than long enough.
Yea. But there is a big bag made of cheese cloth holding the atmosphere inside.
We set a nuke off in space.
Seriously...
You might not know about it so I'll share it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The thing is - they had no fucking idea what it would do, not really. They had some guesses and one guy's theory.
We trashed 7 satellites - some of them not belonging to us, in 1962. Yup... We nuked mother-fucking space, not knowing, based on a scientific guess (that there'd be belts, now known as Van Allan belts I believe), and might have ignited the fucking atmosphere.
The world was PISSED. I mean right fucking pissed. This was in the heart of the Cold War. The USSR was fucking livid. The UK's first satellite? Guess what happened to that... Yeah, it mysteriously stopped working not long after. It was awesome. I was only like five when it happened and even I remember hearing about it. I don't remember if it was then that I remember hearing about it. I might have been older. I didn't see it or anything like that. It's not like they could keep that a secret. No, no... It was pretty noticeable. Someone's gonna notice if you set of a nuke in space.
So, guess what we did after that? We blowed a few more up real good-like. I believe the USSR had a go at it afterwards. At some point, people thought about it and said that it was probably best that we stop attacking space. They were starting to worry that it might be a problem.
I am not kidding. When it goes off - the fireball actually gets larger as it approaches the ground - some of it comes towards the atmosphere, plus it's not truly weightless, it's just really low weight. They had no idea if it was gonna scorch the Earth because they had no idea how long it would keep growing larger - but they had a reasonable guess, it turned out to be right and Van Allen got his data (which was kind of the excuse, as I recall). They named shit after him but I'm not an astronomer or astronomical physics student so I'll be damned if you'll get a good explanation from me if you want details. But, it was generally considered a good idea at the time by the powers that be.
A certain subset, namely those not in power, were pretty sure that everyone had gone insane. You think you hate your government now? Oh my... No, not at all. Imagine a government that will try to attack space, just to show they can do it. They killed satellites that don't belong to us. The UK's very first satellite, a matter of national fucking pride, was a friendly fire incident when the US decided it wasn't to detonate a nuclear bomb... in space... That they weren't sure if it would irradiate the planet in new and horrible ways... And they then decided that wasn't good enough and proceeded to scale that son of a bitch up ever larger. And you're having a hard time accepting Trump or Hillary, aren't you?
KGIII as an AC.
More like the US has set off 10 high altitude nuclear bombs. It just depends on which ones you want to count as space. Starfish Prime was not the furthest out either, one of the earlier ones was at 570km as opposed to the 400km of starfish. That said starfish was a 1.4Mt bomb so it made the biggest impact.
One of the soviet ones managed to push out an EMP measuring in the thousands of amps. It melted hundreds of kms of telephone and power lines and caused a power station to burn to the ground. It went off at about 290km.
They could set the Van Allen belt on fire.
OMG we will all be crushed by Van Allen's pants.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
ANY reactant that is exothermic will work. We on earth have "plenty" of O2 and so we use things that oxidise quickly. Plenty O2 compared to the excess amount generally found in the universe.
> Btrn in soace ;-)
and where is your spell checker ?
Anyone who's played FTL will confirm that.
Just saying, I can't see NASA burning a manned spacecraft.
More like the US has set off 10 high altitude nuclear bombs. It just depends on which ones you want to count as space
If they took out an orbiting satellite, I'd say that counted as space.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'd expect "gravity free" flames to be more chaotic / less predictable... I wonder how many times they'll have to burn the capsule before they get a representative sample.
Seriously, Bigelow should do this as well. They have a cloth structure, so it be good to see how it can withstand a fire.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
These days Porsche carrera are preferred. Fast and blow up.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Gill, why do you claim that the world was pissed. Much of the govs did not know, and the ones that knew were split due to cold war?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Fire in space is an incredibly arcane subject, with almost nothing known.
and probably something that needs extensive study, earthbound building fires have been mitigated (read some magazines by Society of Fire Protection Engineers) but many lessons were learned the hard way throughout the decades. But asking for fire experiments on ISS surely makes everyone cringe as extensive measures must be used to keep it well contained. Problem is need to do experiments to see when fire gets out of control (i.e. take a couch with smoldering cigarette and video all the way to fully engulfed building, see what happens in the process). Maybe rig some Progress vehicles after delivering supplies to do fire experiments?
mfwright@batnet.com
besides the huge fireballs in space, why is that everyone with spacecraft capable of superluminal flight over interstellar distances engage in combat at close range like naval battleships?
mfwright@batnet.com
No question Starfish Prime was space. But there were 10 high altitude detonations. However some of those are under the 70 or 100km altitude that people count as space, so of the 10 high altitudes how many you would count as space depends on your definition. Altitudes are 26, 76, 43, 200, 240, 540, 50, 400, 147, 97km.
You would easily count 5 of them as space, the other 5 maybe not.
That shook my nerves and it rattled my brain.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Unmanned, you say
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
They couldn't not know. Do you have any idea what that did to the sky? There were brilliant Auroras that lasted for ages, a giant friggen fireball visible from thousands of miles away, and then light continuing to spread from there, lighting up areas across the globe but not directly - it made the dark sky light(er).
There was no hiding this one. There were others that were higher and others that were lower. Some could be seen, some not so easily noticed with the tech they had back then. They still had planes with radiation detectors and they all spied on each other worse than they ever do today. This was something like 1962. The whole world knew about it - they announced the scientific discovery at one point. Not long after.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."