When your home is an aluminum spacecraft in Earth orbit - hundreds of miles from the nearest fire station - saturating a potential fire early and fast can be a lifesaver.

What if the International Space Station (ISS) catches fire, surely the scientists have thought of the situation and the crew of the International Space Station staged an emergency drill at the outpost on Monday, practicing the procedures they would march through in the event of a fire. These routine procedures review to make sure that the crew would be ready to respond to an emergency.

The space station is so dependent on computers that the lights cannot be turned on or off without a computer command and in a fire scenario on board ISS the scientists need to know much more than the current data.

All the Space Shuttles and the ISS have fire extinguishers but, as with fire detectors, there are some differences. The Shuttles use a Halon-based suppressant for portable extinguishers and the fixed system in the avionics bays. All modules of the ISS use carbon dioxide (CO2) extinguishers, except the Russian module, which uses water-based, foam extinguishers that are similar to those that were used on Mir.

These different approaches suggest that our understanding of microgravity fire suppression is incomplete. This is because there is little data on the fires of microgravity. Design decisions for previous spacecraft have been based primarily on Earth-based suppression experiments. Designers favored CO2 for the ISS because of its effectiveness on Earth-based fires and because it could be removed from the spacecraft’s atmosphere by other on-board systems. However, little has been done to determine which agent is best for suppressing microgravity fires while offering the least invasiveness.

Via: Floridatoday46112