ESA's Fluid Science Laboratory Decommissioned After 18 Years in Orbit

Astronauts on the International Space Station have begun the final decommissioning of the European Space Agency's Fluid Science Laboratory (FSL), a facility that operated for 18 years, nearly twice its planned lifetime. Since its launch in 2008, FSL has been instrumental in investigating how fluids, foams, emulsions, and granular materials behave in microgravity, supporting 18 scientific experiments and accumulating over 42,000 hours of operations.