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IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration

See The First Videos Back From NASA's Spacecraft Fire Experiment

• http://www.popsci.com, By Mary Beth Griggs

We've gotten a teaser trailer from this week's Saffire I experiment.

Earlier this week, NASA ignited a fire inside a special box on the Earth-bound Cygnus spacecraft. The experiment, known as the Spacecraft Fire Experiment (Saffire) is designed to see how fire will spread in low gravity environments, so researchers can design better fire protections in space.

But before they actually lit the unfortunate 4.16 square feet of cotton and fiberglass fabric on fire, the researcher had the experiment run a test, sending tendrils of smoke across the box to make sure that air was flowing through smoothly. That's what you see above.

Then came the good part. The fabric was ignited on one side by a hot wire on the material, and began to smolder and burn for approximately eight minutes.


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