The European Space Agency (ESA) has teamed up with China to send small containers of crude oil into space, in an effort to better understand how oil behaves in deep underground reservoirs.
The experiment is called 'Soret Coefficient in Crude Oil' and consists of six sturdy cylinders, each containing a millilitre of crude oil, pressurised to 400 times our normal atmospheric level - among the highest pressure items ever made for space.
The package has already passed a gamut of testing at ESA's Technical Centre, in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, including the temperature shifts of orbital flight and the vibration and shocks of launch and reentry.
The outcome of a partnership between ESA, China's National Space Science Center, France's Total oil company and China's PetroChina oil company, it will fly on China's SJ-10 Shi Jian spacecraft near the end of 2015, along with 19 other weightless experiments.
Launched from China's Juiquan site in the Gobi desert, the spacecraft will spend almost two weeks in orbit before descending. Once it lands in SiChuan province, the oil team will retrieve the specimens for detailed analysis.
"The experiment is intended to sharpen our understanding of deep crude oil reservoirs, up to 7-8 km underground," said Antonio Verga, who is overseeing the project for ESA.
"The combination of the crushing pressure and temperature gradient as you go further down is thought to create a 'diffusion' effect: petroleum compounds move based on temperature, defying gravity.
"Over geological timescales, heavier deposits end up rising, while lighter ones sink. The aim is to quantify this effect in weightlessness, helping to guide future decisions on oil exploration," Verga said.
