NASA Flame Extinguishing Experimen: Combustion of liquid fuel in microgravity

Because of the absence of gravity, fuels burning in space behave very differently than they do on Earth.

In this image, a 3-millimeter diameter droplet of heptane fuel burns in microgravity, producing soot.

When a bright, uniform backlight is placed behind the droplet and flame and recorded by a video camera, the soot appears as a dark cloud. Image processing techniques can then quantify the soot concentration at each point in the image.

On the International Space Station, the Flame Extinguishing Experiment examines the combustion of such liquid fuel droplets.

This colorised gray-scale image is a composite of the individual video frames of the backlit fuel droplet.

The bright yellow structure in the middle is the path of the droplet, which becomes smaller as it burns. Initial soot structures (in green) tend to form near the liquid fuel.

These come together into larger and larger particles which ultimately spiral out of the flame zone in long, twisting streamers.

Image Credit: NASA

Stop NASA's Plans to Expose Monkeys to Radiation | PETA.org

Stop NASA's Plans to Expose Monkeys to Radiation PETA.org

For many people, NASA represents cutting-edge science and grandiose achievements like sending a human to the moon. Unfortunately, future NASA plans are not so inspiring.

NASA has announced that it plans to fund a $1.75 million project in which up to 30 squirrel monkeys will be exposed to a large, harmful dose of radiation and then be locked in steel cages without any companionship.

They will be forced to endure years of behavioural tests to measure the inevitable devastation that the radiation causes to their brains and bodies, which would likely include brain damage, skin inflammation, blindness, various types of cancer, including brain tumors, and premature death.

Because of drastic biological differences between species, radiation experiments on monkeys won't tell scientists anything about how astronauts will react to deep space. Luckily, modern in vitro and clinical research methods are available and can be used to study the affects of space radiation on the human body.

In the past, NASA has halted plans to use monkeys in space experiments when the public spoke out against this cruelty, and animals need your support once again. Please contact NASA officials and politely ask them to permanently halt plans to fund radiation experiments using monkeys and to instead direct their funds to modern and humane methods of scientific inquiry.