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Space Shuttle Endeavour carries MSC ProjectAt 4:19 p.m. CST on Wednsday December 5th the Space Shuttle Endeavour was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying an experiment in the cargo bay from the Microgravity Smoldering Combustion (MSC) project. The MSC project is an on-going research program developed jointly by the Microgravity Combustion Labs here at U.C. Berkeley, under the leadership of Professor Carlos Fernandez-Pello, and by an engineering team at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, under the leadership of Dr. David Urban. To date the MSC experiment has flown three times aboard the Space Shuttle. This will be the fourth and last Space Shuttle mission carrying a MSC experiment. Shown in the photographs below are the MSC flight hardware, flown in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle. The two major components are the test section assembly (left), instrumented for thermal and ultrasound analysis, and the overall flight assembly (right) which houses the test section. The foam sample is polyurethane cylinder, 120 mm in diameter and 150 mm in length. The samples are tested under different conditions; oxidizer flow, ambient oxygen concentration and configurations.
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Smolder
is a form of nonflaming combustion that occurs in porous materials such
as packing foam, and electrical wire bundles. Smolder is a serious fire-safety
problem because of the toxicity of the products, the potential to
erupt into flames and the difficulty of detecting it.
The danger is even greater in space, where the crew
cannot flee a burning space facility. NASA is concerned about fires in space
as longer duration missions are being planned. The MSC experiment will provide
critical data on the behavior of smoldering combustion both on Earth
and in the reduced-gravity environment of a spacecraft. |
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