NASA Engineering and Safety Center Technical Bulletin No. 21-03-1: Best Practices for the Elemental Profiling of High-Purity Hydrazine

Trace contaminants in high-purity hydrazine (HPH) propellant impact a wide variety of commercial, Department of Defense
(DoD), and NASA missions. Depending on thruster design, elemental contaminants must be kept at extremely low levels and
are verified as such by routine analysis. A number of these contaminants have recently undergone an assessment to shed light
on their quantities present following changes in the HPH supply chain. A round robin analysis utilizing four separate laboratories
resulted in unacceptably high variability in the quantification of these contaminants. The principal objective of this technical
bulletin is to signal the availability of a new analysis methodology which yields accurate and repeatable quantification by
providing best practices for both quantitation methodology and strategies for avoiding sample contamination during analysis.