experiment Archives

February 16, 2024February 16, 2024 by Evan Gough

NASA is Done Setting Fires Inside its Doomed Cargo Spacecraft

NASA's Saffire program is a series of experiments designed to understand how fire behaves in a spacecraft. In this image, a sample of fabric burns inside an uncrewed Cygnus cargo craft during a previous Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiment investigation, Saffire-IV. Image Credit: NASA

Fire on a spacecraft can be catastrophic. It can spread quickly in a confined space, and for trapped astronauts, there may be no escape. It’s fading in time now, but Apollo 1, which was to be the first crewed Apollo mission, never got off the ground because of a fire that killed the crew. There’ve been other dangerous spacecraft fires too, like the one onboard the Russian Mir space station in 1997.

In an effort to understand how fire behaves in spacecraft, NASA began its Saffire (Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiment) in 2016. Saffire was an eight-year, six-mission effort to study how fire behaves in space. The final Saffire test was completed on January 9th.

September 21, 2023September 21, 2023 by Laurence Tognetti

Solar Sails Could Reach Mars in Just 26 Days

Artist's rendition of the upcoming NASA Solar Cruiser mission due to launch in February 2025, an example of the type of solar sail being developed for this most recent study. (Credit: NASA)

A recent study submitted to Acta Astronautica explores the potential for using aerographite solar sails for traveling to Mars and interstellar space, which could dramatically reduce both the time and fuel required for such missions. This study comes while ongoing research into the use of solar sails is being conducted by a plethora of organizations along with the successful LightSail2 mission by The Planetary Society, and holds the potential to develop faster and more efficient propulsion systems for long-term space missions.

April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 by Paul M. Sutter

Gravity is tested down to a scale smaller than the thickness of a human hair

Gravity was the first force of nature to be realized, and in the centuries since we first cracked the code of that all-pervasive pulling power, scientists have continually come up with clever ways to test our understanding. And it’s no surprise why: the discovery of a new wrinkle in the gravitational force could open up vistas of new physics, and maybe even the nature of reality itself.

July 17, 2019July 17, 2019 by Evan Gough

Screaming Sounds Sent to the Edge of Space, Confirming That… “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream”

A unique, low-cost, and crowd-scream-sourced experiment has proven what all sci-fi movie fans know is true: In space, no one can hear you scream.”

That line is the tag line from the famous 1979 movie Alien, of course. And now an innovative experiment in Britain has shown that the writer of that movie was correct. To prove it, they used off-the-shelf electronics, an inexpensive balloon, and the recorded screams from a mother in South Africa.