The US space agency’s commercial partner Orbital ATK is looking forward to launch its Cygnus spacecraft into orbit on March 22, 2016, atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket for its fifth contracted resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS).

Known as Orbital ATK CRS-6, the flight will deliver experiments to the ISS to analyze fire, regolith, adhesion, meteors, and 3-D printing in microgravity.

The Spacecraft Fire Experiment-I (Saffire-I) deliberately lights huge-scale fire within an empty Cygnus resupply vehicle, post escaping the space station and prior to it makes an entry into Earth's atmosphere again.

The research over combustion and fire processes in decreased gravity has been on for decades, and in the time span, some experiments have directly analyzed spacecraft fire safety during low-gravity situations, and no single experiment of them has studied sample and environment sizes usually expected in a spacecraft fire.

The Saffire-I investigation has opened the window to a new way of studying a realistic fire on an exploration vehicle, which hasn’t been possible previously, as the risks of carrying out such studies on manned spacecraft are very high.

While returning, the instruments on Cygnus will note down flame growth, oxygen use, and many other factors. Results may help in calculation of microgravity flammability limits for a number of spacecraft materials, assisting the validation of NASA's material selection criteria.

It would also prove helpful for scientists in understanding the impact of microgravity and restricted oxygen on flame size. The investigation holds lot of significance for the safety of present and future space missions.

Meteor Composition Determination (Meteor) will make possible the first space-based observations of meteors making an entry into our planet’s atmosphere from space.

Strata-I is a more 'grounded' investigation that will analyze the properties and activities of regolith, the impact-shattered ‘soil’ detected on the Moon, asteroids, comets, and other worlds without atmosphere.