NASA Glenn partners with Blue Origin to test materials for next generation of space flight
On Tuesday, Blue Origin successfully launched its 29th New Shepard Flight. On board, were 30 payloads or experiments, one of which has ties to Northeast Ohio.
"I know that everyone worked really hard to make this a successful experiment," says Tom DeMichael, Project Manager of LUCI.
One of those payloads was known as LUCI, or the Lunar Combustion Investigation Experiment, worked on by a team at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland in partnership with Voyager Technologies. Once the New Shepard Mission launches it will reach a point of what's known as free fall and spin at a rate of 11 revolutions per minute. Once lunar gravity is simulated, LUCI's mission can begin.
"Our experiment is going up there to burn materials that we can potentially use for new astronaut fabrics, spacecraft material. We are looking to see how that material reacts when burned in lunar gravity," adds DeMichael.
LUCI's payload will contain a combustion chamber that will burn two samples; cotton fiberglass fabric and a plastic rod. The goal is to understand if lunar gravity poses more of a fire risk for materials on future missions.
Before NASA Glenn's next payload or experiment can board the Blue Origin rocket, it's first worked on here. This is their zero gravity facility, and in their drop towers, they can simulate free fall. The actual experiment will take two and a half minutes but they're hoping to get the results quickly so they can continue their work from there.
"First, we want to make sure everything burned okay. We set these materials on fire, so we looked at the video and made sure everything burned properly. After that we take a more detailed analysis, we take flame measurements, measure oxygen and carbon dioxide concentration so we can quantify how these burn differently in a lunar gravity compared to an Earth gravity," says Paul Ferkul, Project Scientist with LUCI.
Whether it's testing materials at the zero-gravity facility in Cleveland or on-board a Blue Origin rocket, NASA Glenn's team hopes that their work can help pave the way for safer materials for the next generation of space flight.
"We've done tests at zero gravity and lunar gravity and for some materials, they burn better at different gravity levels so this is a concern for NASA. NASA chooses their materials on a 1G test method, but some of our research suggests that in some conditions that might not be the most hazardous from a materials safety standpoint," adds Ferkul.
