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NASA Awards Contracts for Acquisition of Liquid Nitrogen, Oxygen


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NASA has awarded contracts to six companies to supply liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen in support of operations at agency centers and facilities across the United States. The indefinite-delivery/fixed-price contract runs from Monday, July 1, 2024, through June 30, 2029.

The awards and approximate maximum contract values are:

  • Air Products and Chemicals Inc., Allentown, Pennsylvania, $36.9 million
  • Airgas USA LLC (South), Kennesaw, Georgia, $4.7 million
  • Airgas USA LLC (Central), Tulsa, Oklahoma, $5.1 million
  • Linde Inc., Danbury, Connecticut, $42.2 million
  • Matheson Tri-Gas Inc., Warren, New Jersey, $1.8 million  
  • Messer LLC, Bridgewater, New Jersey, $62.3 million

The total maximum delivery of liquid nitrogen, which NASA uses for pneumatic actuation, purging and inerting, pressurization, and cooling, will be about 656.8 tons, 30.4 million gallons, and 740,000 liters. The total maximum delivery of liquid oxygen, which is used as an oxidizer in cryogenic rocket engines, will be about 2.1 million gallons and 243,000 tons.

The commodities will support current and future aerospace flight, simulation, research, development, testing, and other operations at the following NASA centers and facilities: Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio; Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Johnson Space Center in Houston and White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico; Kennedy Space Center in Florida; Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia; Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama; Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans; and Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

For more information about NASA programs and missions, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

-end-

Abbey Donaldson
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
abbey.a.donaldson@nasa.gov  

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      NASA/TM-20240007062, June 2024. Singh, U.: Evaluation and Testing of Anaerobic Hydrogen Sensors for the
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      About the size of Earth’s Moon, Io is known as the most volcanically active body in our solar system. The moon is home to an estimated 400 volcanoes, which blast lava and plumes in seemingly continuous eruptions that contribute to the coating on its surface. 
      This animated tour of Jupiter’s fiery moon Io, based on data collected by NASA’s Juno mission, shows volcanic plumes, a view of lava on the surface, and the moon’s internal structure. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/Koji Kuramura/Gerald Eichstädt Although the moon was discovered by Galileo Galilei on Jan. 8, 1610, volcanic activity there wasn’t discovered until 1979, when imaging scientist Linda Morabito of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California first identified a volcanic plume in an image from the agency’s Voyager 1 spacecraft.
      “Since Morabito’s discovery, planetary scientists have wondered how the volcanoes were fed from the lava underneath the surface,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Was there a shallow ocean of white-hot magma fueling the volcanoes, or was their source more localized? We knew data from Juno’s two very close flybys could give us some insights on how this tortured moon actually worked.”
      The Juno spacecraft made extremely close flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024, getting within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of its pizza-faced surface. During the close approaches, Juno communicated with NASA’s Deep Space Network, acquiring high-precision, dual-frequency Doppler data, which was used to measure Io’s gravity by tracking how it affected the spacecraft’s acceleration. What the mission learned about the moon’s gravity from those flybys led to the new paper by revealing more details about the effects of a phenomenon called tidal flexing.
      This five-frame sequence shows a giant plume erupting from Io’s Tvashtar volcano, extending 200 miles (330 kilometers) above the fiery moon’s surface. It was captured over an eight-minute period by NASA’s New Horizons mission as the spacecraft flew by Jupiter in 2007.NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/SwRI Prince of Jovian Tides
      Io is extremely close to mammoth Jupiter, and its elliptical orbit whips it around the gas giant once every 42.5 hours. As the distance varies, so does Jupiter’s gravitational pull, which leads to the moon being relentlessly squeezed. The result: an extreme case of tidal flexing — friction from tidal forces that generates internal heat.
      “This constant flexing creates immense energy, which literally melts portions of Io’s interior,” said Bolton. “If Io has a global magma ocean, we knew the signature of its tidal deformation would be much larger than a more rigid, mostly solid interior. Thus, depending on the results from Juno’s probing of Io’s gravity field, we would be able to tell if a global magma ocean was hiding beneath its surface.”
      The Juno team compared Doppler data from their two flybys with observations from the agency’s previous missions to the Jovian system and from ground telescopes. They found tidal deformation consistent with Io not having a shallow global magma ocean.
      “Juno’s discovery that tidal forces do not always create global magma oceans does more than prompt us to rethink what we know about Io’s interior,” said lead author Ryan Park, a Juno co-investigator and supervisor of the Solar System Dynamics Group at JPL. “It has implications for our understanding of other moons, such as Enceladus and Europa, and even exoplanets and super-Earths. Our new findings provide an opportunity to rethink what we know about planetary formation and evolution.”
      There’s more science on the horizon. The spacecraft made its 66th science flyby over Jupiter’s mysterious cloud tops on Nov. 24. Its next close approach to the gas giant will occur 12:22 a.m. EST, Dec. 27. At the time of perijove, when Juno’s orbit is closest to the planet’s center, the spacecraft will be about 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops and will have logged 645.7 million miles (1.039 billion kilometers) since entering the gas giant’s orbit in 2016.
      More About Juno
      JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency (ASI) funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft. Various other institutions around the U.S. provided several of the other scientific instruments on Juno.
      More information about Juno is available at:
      https://science.nasa.gov/mission/juno
      News Media Contacts
      DC Agle
      Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
      818-393-9011
      agle@jpl.nasa.gov
      Karen Fox / Erin Morton
      NASA Headquarters, Washington
      202-385-1287 / 202-805-9393
      karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / erin.morton@nasa.gov
      Deb Schmid
      Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
      210-522-2254
      dschmid@swri.org
      2024-173
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