Cryogenics and Fluids Branch
Cryogenics Site Map, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
This site map links you to all the main divisions of our website and to many of the smaller twigs and branches.
The information you'll find here is about cryogenics, the study of cold temperatures. You will not find information about cryonics, a field with a confusingly similar name, which deals with the possibility of freezing and reviving people.
Part 1. Basic Branch Info
- Cryogenics & Fluids Home
- Programs
- Brief descriptions or our research and development programs.
- Contact Info
- Space Cooler Overview
- briefly describes various available systems.
- Cooler Questions
- helps you identify the information that will let you decide what sort of cooling system would work for your project.
- Publications
- Lists of some of our recent publications.
Part 2. Not-So-Technical Information
- Introduction to Cryogenics
- First stop if you're not a cryogenicist.
- Liquid Helium
- Liquid Helium in Space
- Some applications and behaviors of liquid helium in space.
- Pumping Helium
- How the SHOOT project pumped helium in the Space Shuttle.
- Temperature Scales
- More than just Fahrenheit & Celsius
- Temperature Calculator
- Convert Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin...
- Negative Kelvin
- Can something be colder than absolute zero?
- Comparing Cooling Techniques
- Comparisons of the basic techniques of cryo cooling.
- Introduction to the ADR
- The Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator (ADR), for temperatures below 1 Kelvin
- Introduction to XRS
- The X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS) was a cryogenic payload designed and built at Goddard
- We don't freeze people.
Part 3. Where to Get More Information on Cryogenics:
Some Technical, Some Non-Technical
The truth is out there. So is a lot of other stuff.
- Publications
- Links to lists of some of our publications, grouped by subject.
- NASA Education Resources
- Websites and field centers with educational resources, for teachers and students.
- Aerospace Websites
- A selection of sites, some useful, some fun, some both.
- Books
- For cryogenicists and beginners alike
- Advances in Cryogenic Engineering
- Cryogenic conference proceedings. Mainly for professional cryogenicists.
- Space Cryogenic Workshop
- More cryogenic conference proceedings. Mainly for professional cryogenicists.
Part 4. Mostly Technical: Our Research and Development Projects
This section is mainly for professional cryogenicists, but I've tried to scatter enough basic information throughout that anyone could find something of interest.
I've divided this section into 2 parts: A is the technology development section, B is the flight projects section. Of course, the division is not as complete in real life as on this site map; every flight project involves technology development to some extent.
Part 4A. Technology Development
- The Adiabatic Demagnetization Refrigerator (ADR)
- The ADR cools to temperatures below 1 Kelvin.
- An ADR Primer
- How the ADR works. For a less technical version, see Introduction to the ADR
- Advanced ADR
- A multi-stage ADR being developed here at Goddard.
- Advanced ADR Animated
- An animated schematic of the Advanced ADR
- Mechanical Cryocoolers
- Mechanical coolers, by a number of manufacturers.
- Cooler types
- An introduction to some of the general types of coolers that we use: large, miniature, and vibration free.
- Ball
- Ball Aerospace Stirling Cycle Cooler
- Creare Turbo Brayton
- A miniature cooler, scheduled for use on the NICMOS instrument
of the Hubble Space Telescope
- STS-95 HOST Flight
- A test of the NICMOS Turbo-Brayton cooler on board the Shuttle.
- Photo of NICMOS Cooler in the laboratory
- Sunpower Stirling Cycle Coolers
- Phillips Cooler
- Testbed for magnetic bearings and clearance seals.
- Lockheed pulse tube minicoolers.
- References
- References to articles on coolers published by Goddard researchers.
- Liquid Helium and Hybrid Systems
- Liquid helium continues to play a role in space cryogenics.
- Other Hardware
- We also look at hardware which, instead of producing cold temperatures, uses
the cold temperatures.
- Superconducting Gravity Gradiometer
- A proposal for a satellite instrument which would map variations in the strength of Earth's gravitational field.
Part 4B. Flight Projects
- COBE the COsmic Background Explorer
- TheCOBE satellite, designed
and built at Goddard, gathered data on the Big Bang.
- COBE cooling system
- Description and schematic of COBE's liquid helium system.
- Skymap
- Plot of some of the data gathered by COBE.
- Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA)
- SOFIA is a 747 airliner converted to carry a telescope. Code 552 has worked on 2 instruments for that telescope.
- The High Energy Solar Specrtroscopic Imager HESSI)
- A solar astronomy satellite, cooled by a mechanical cooler.
- Superfluid Helium On-Orbit Transfer (SHOOT)
- The SHOOT
project transferred helium back and forth between 2 dewars in the Space Shuttle
cargo bay.
- References to published papers.
- SHOOT at the Cape
- An account of SHOOT's launch, written by one of the team who worked on it at the Cape.
- XRS, the X-Ray Spectrometer
- The X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS) was an
instrument on the ASTRO-E spacecraft, lost during a launch failure in 2000. The
technology developed for it will probably be used again, on a rebuilt XRS or on
other missions.
- Heat Loads to the XRS helium tank
- To help extend the lifetime of XRS's liquid helium coolant, we studied all the possible heat loads we could think of, including many which turned out to be negligible.
- Fill and vent lines
- We used metal bellows, with Kevlar supports, to reduce the heat load through the helium fill and vent lines
- Film Killer
- Superfluid liquid helium, travelling as a thin film, can escape from containment. Here's how we avoided loosing our supply of liquid helium to that phenomenon.
- High Temperature Superconductors
- We used electrical leads of high temperature superconductor to help cut down the heat loads to our liquid helium supply.
- Mass Guaging
- To measure the amount of liquid helium in a vessel, use a heat pulse.
- References
- References to some published papers about XRS.
