Safety Aboard the International Space Station

As with any task that NASA takes on, safety is of utmost importaqce. There are pages of safety codes and procedures that must be followed before any idea can be brought to life. Unfortunately, the International Space Station s (ISS) safety regulations and procedures are based on lg standards rather than on Og. To aide in making this space age home away from home a less hazardous environment, I worked on several projects revolving around the dangers of flammable items in microgravity. The first task I was assigned was to track flames. This involves turning eight millimeter video recordings, of tests run in the five second drop tower, into avi format on the computer. The footage is then compressed and altered so that the flame can be seen more clearly. Using another program called Spotlight, line profiles were used to collect data describing the luminescence of the flame at different points. These raw data are saved as text files and run trough a macro so that a Matlab program can analyze it. By fitting the data to a curve and determining the areas of brightest luminescence, the behavior of the flame can be recorded numerically. After entering the data into a database, researchers can come back later and easily get information on flames resulting from different gas and liquid mixtures in microgravity. I also worked on phase two of the FATE project, which deals with safety aboard the ISS. This phase involves igniting projected droplets and determining how they react with secondary materials. Such simulations represent, on a small scale, the spread of onboard fires due to the effervescence of burning primary materials. I set up existing hardware to operate these experiments and ran tests with it, photographing the results. I also made CAD drawings of the apparatus and the area available on the (SF)2 rig for it to fit into. The experiment will later be performed on the KC-135, and the results gathered will be used to reanalyze current safety standards for the ISS, including the distance of required separation for flammable materials. Additional information is included in the original extended abstract.