NASA has been conducting space fire experiments to better understand fire safety in space and on spacecrafts, and it sure does look weird.
While NASA has done similar studies aboard the International Space Station before, potential risks meant these experiments were limited in size and scope. The new round of Spacecraft Fire Safety experiments, called "Saffire," began earlier this year, with NASA remotely igniting nine different material swatches in a cargo ship orbiting Earth:
The second experiment (in the videos above), Saffire-II, took place last week, and while NASA don't yet have enough data to produce the experiment's results, they have released two videos of two samples — Nomex (Sample 7) and Plexiglass (Sample 9) — being burned. Nomex is often used for cargo storage bags and plexiglass is used for spacecraft windows.
The experiments intend to help NASA understand how fire behaves in space, with the company saying, "Understanding how fire spreads in a microgravity environment is critical to the safety of astronauts who live and work in space."
David Urban, principal investigator, said, "Saffire seeks to answer two questions.
"Will an upward spreading flame continue to grow or will microgravity limit the size? Secondly, what fabrics and materials will catch fire and how will they burn?"
While NASA figures out how fire works in space, they also need your help figuring out what to do with astronaut poop.
Alanah Pearce is an editor at IGN, who really likes writing about space stuff. You can find her on Twitter @Charalanahzard.
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