It was filled with 4,087 pounds of trash and disposables – broken hardware, dirty laundry, empty food containers – before the astronauts closed the hatch for today’s unberthing.
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Sussex astronaut Tim Peake is making final preparations for his triumphant return back to Earth – following a packed six months of working on the International Space Station (ISS). The trio of astronauts was a part of Expedition 47 and includes Commander Tim Kopra of NASA, Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos and Flight Engineer Tim Peake of the European Space Agency (ESA).
A picture of Cygnus taken this morning.
The video below shows the Cygnus CRS-6 leaving the space station. The controlled burn was the largest fire ever started in space, and it burned inside an insulated container in the cargo hold, all in an attempt to better understand the nature of a fire in zero-gravity and how we can improve the safety of astronauts while in space. Onboard Cygnus, the experiment developed at NASA’s Glenn Research Center with the support of NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems Division will intentionally ignite and record a large-scale fire that will grow and advance until it burns itself out.
The cargo included Saffire, a module containing a 97 cm by 49 cm cotton-and-fiberglass material sample that will be set on fire after Cygnus reaches a safe distance from the station. The company designs, builds and delivers space, defense and aviation systems for customers around the world, both as a prime contractor and merchant supplier.
“We wanna get there [to Mars] but we want not to put your lives at stake”, said Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO).
“Saffire seeks to answer two questions”, David Urban, Saffire principal investigator, said in a statement earlier this year. “So our building of future spacecraft is based on one-G understanding and extrapolation of very small, short-duration experiments”. The experiment will be repeated two more times this year with other Cygnus capsules, according to NASA.
The experiment took place inside a special enclosure within the spacecraft that was about four feet long, 1.5 feet wide and three feet deep.
NASA has the moral obligation to provide for lifetime healthcare for all illnesses, said Jeffrey Kahn, chairman of the ethics committee at the National Academies of Sciences that issued the 2014 report, at the hearing. When commanded by Orbital ATK and Saffire ground controllers operating from Dulles, VA, it will be ignited by a hot wire. Instruments on the returning Cygnus will measure flame growth, oxygen use and more.
The SAFFIRE mission logo.
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Launched to the space station in an Orbital ATK Cygnus resupply cargo vehicle on March 22, Saffire remained in Cygnus for 81 days as supplies were offloaded by the station’s crew.
