Hypergolic propellants are designed to ignite quickly and spontaneously when the fuel and oxidizer are mixed, thus eliminating the need for an external ignition source. These propellants are used in applications where ignition must be quick and repeatable, such as RCS thrusters. However, the state-of-the art propellants (monomethylhydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide) are both highly toxic, which makes propellant loading procedures difficult and costly. Thus, there is interest in identifying alternative hypergolic propellants which are easier to use.

The most commonly used technique for screening potential hypergolic fuel candidates is a ''drop test''. In these tests, a droplet of fuel or oxidizer is allowed to fall into a small pool of the other propellant. This test is recorded using a high speed camera and the ignition delay is defined as the time between initial contact between the two propellants and first emission of light from a flame. A feasible hypergolic propellant combination should have an ignition delay below 5 ms. While drop tests are useful for screening whether a given propellant combination is able to ignite quickly, they are poor approximations of conditions in thrusters, and thus actual optimized performance in a real thruster may differ from drop test behavior.

In this lab, research on novel hypergolic propellants primarily focuses on identifying new fuels hypergolic with one of two oxidizers: dinitrogen tetroxide or hydrogen peroxide. Dinitrogen tetroxide has the advantage of being easier to store and widely used, while hydrogen peroxide is significantly less toxic. Other oxidizers, such as concentrated nitric acid, are also studied occiasionally. It is important to note that sometimes these drop tests can result in interesting spectacles.

For various projects, it has occasionally been of interest to control the conditions at which drop tests occur. Test stands which control temperature, pressure, and atmospheric composition have been developed. Additional existing infrastructure include a streak camera which allows fast, time-resolved emission spectroscopy.