WORCESTER, Mass. – In an effort to better understand how wildfires spread, a WPI professor is sending his research to space.

It's not a place you'd expect to learn about fires, but Assistant Professor James Urban said the International Space Station is a more controlled environment without the effects of gravity or buoyancy.

Astronauts will perform experiments over the next year.

Urban said the fire models will help predict how a fire is going to spread, and could potentially tell firefighters how to respond.

"When you're trying to make decisions about how to respond to a fire, you know, we want to protect people and so if the fire is really going to get out of hand, you want to stop it,” said Urban. “If it’s going to be low intensity, maybe you want to leave it. You need to have a fire model that can predict what's going to happen. And a better physical understanding of how those fires spread, like the data from this experiment that could help inform those models and lead to better predictions so people know what to do. Whether they need to go defend the fire, where to send resources, or whether it's one where they can just sort of monitor it and keep it, you know, put guardrails on it and let it reduce the fuel."

The research is scheduled to head to space as early as Saturday on a rocket launch form NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.