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Outer Space has a Smell

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Feb 13, 2008 10:16 AM
from the anosmia-sucks-in-space-too dept.
Space Science
repapetilto writes "ISS Science Officer Don Pettit reports in his journal that outer space gives off a smell best described as "a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation." Kind of odd considering smell is supposed to be due to volatilized chemical compounds."
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Submission: Outer Space has a Smell by repapetilto (1219852)
[+] Idle: The Smell of Space 70 comments
According to NASA scientists, space smells a lot like my uncle's workshop. One can detect hints of fried steak, hot metal, and the welding of a motorbike. They have hired Steven Pearce, a chemist and managing director of fragrance manufacturing company Omega Ingredients, to recreate the smell in a laboratory. NASA will use his research to help train potential astronauts. Steven said, "I did some work for an art exhibition in July, which was based entirely on smell, and one of the things I created was the smell of the inside of the Mir space station. NASA heard about it and contacted me to see if I could help them recreate the smell of space to help their astronauts."
[+] The Taste Of Space 81 comments
It turns out that space tastes like raspberries and not Tang or freeze-dried ice cream as one might suspect. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy were searching for evidence of amino acids in space when they found ethyl formate, the chemical used in to make raspberry flavoring. The astronomers used the IRAM telescope in Spain to analyze electromagnetic radiation emitted by a hot and dense region of Sagittarius B2 that surrounds a newborn star. Astronomer Arnaud Belloche said, "It [ethyl formate] does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries."
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  • Take a big wiff (Score:5, Funny)

    by suso (153703) * on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:16AM (#22406116) Homepage Journal
    Too bad the vacuum of space will suck that smell right out of your nose.

  • Sounds Like Ozone (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eldavojohn (898314) * <my/.username@@@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:17AM (#22406126) Homepage Journal
    When I was younger, I also arc wielded to fix various metal things around farms. I too noticed this sweet, metallic smell.

    When I was a teenager I read a lot of short stories. Especially all the sci-fi & horror ones like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick or Stephen King. I don't recall which one it was but a character had a train set that had a short in it on the tracks. The arcing electricity would give off this same smell. I learned through this short story that this is an incidental way to produce ozone (O3) [wikipedia.org], a greenhouse gas. And that the smell is in fact a low amount of ozone. Perhaps you've detected it at the dentists office or while operating an engine? From the Wikipedia entry:

    Ozone may be formed from O2 by electrical discharges and by action of high energy electromagnetic radiation. Certain electrical equipment generate significant levels of ozone. This is especially true of devices using high voltages, such as ionic air purifiers, laser printers, photocopiers, and arc welders. Electric motors using brushes can generate ozone from repeated sparking inside the unit. Large motors that use brushes, such as those used by elevators or hydraulic pumps, will generate more ozone than smaller motors.
    I hope he doesn't write himself off as crazy if he did detect ozone. Or at least investigate where it could have come from. If there's tiny molecules of ozone floating around in orbit of the earth, I'm certain that would be scientifically interesting. Perhaps he should test the properties of these materials when exposed to ozone, do they attract the molecules? Or perhaps he should put the materials in a vacuum here on earth for a bit and then pull them out and see if he detects the same smell?

    The human nose can be an extremely strong tool for some individuals, perhaps this is more than just psychosomatic? It would drive me crazy to never investigate this if I were in his shoes. It may seem trivial but sometimes a peculiar notion is what drives scientists make a novel discovery ... or waste lots and lots of time.

    • Re:Sounds Like Ozone (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:27AM (#22406304)

      If there's tiny molecules of ozone floating around in orbit of the earth, I'm certain that would be scientifically interesting.

      Indeed. I'm sure scientists would be astounded to discover that there is a "layer" around the Earth comprised of "ozone".

    • Re:Sounds Like Ozone (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ivan256 (17499) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:30AM (#22406330)
      That smell is also really bad for you. The Ozone oxidizes the inside of your nose and throat. If you breathe in a large quantity, you'll get a sore throat fairly quickly, and can die after several minutes in a room with a high concentration.

      I have a commercial ozone generator that I bought to use after my basement flooded to kill the mold. I had it on a timer for a while to run for an hour at night. Power went out, the timer got offset, and I went down there during the day while it was on. One lungful and I had a sore throat for a week.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by ivan256 (17499)
          Same here.

          Luckily it is also short lived. It rapidly breaks down into plain oxygen, and the smell goes away. I don't understand, though, how people can be in a room with one of those poorly made Ionic Breeze devices. They generate just enough ozone to drive me nuts. I don't even like walking by the outside of a Brookstone/Sharper Image store in the mall because of them.

    • Re:Sounds Like Ozone (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gwait (179005) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:33AM (#22406376)
      Since there's an awful lot of charged particles, micrometeorites, and high energy photons bathing the astronauts while on a space walk,
      perhaps the smell is coming from all the ionized molecules on their suits and gear.

      Also, the space station is not entirely out of the atmosphere, is it? Isn't the top layer a lot of ionized gas as well - due to the same radiation sources?

      It would be interesting to compare the molecules per cubic meter in the ISS airlock with the number of molecules per cubic meter a human nose can detect..

      I hope he does continue to research this curiosity!

    • Re:Sounds Like Ozone (Score:5, Funny)

      by Kamineko (851857) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:43AM (#22406504)

      If there's tiny molecules of ozone floating around in orbit of the earth, I'm certain that would be scientifically interesting.

      Ozone... around the Earth?

      You mean like some kind of... layer?

      (Yes, I know, I know. Couldn't help it. :P)

        • Diff between pilots and scientists (Score:5, Insightful)

          by myvirtualid (851756) <pwwnow@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday February 13 2008, @02:46PM (#22410206) Journal

          After over 40 years in space this is the first guy to bring this up?? Hm... Smells fishy if you ask me..

          Reminds me of an anecdote from one the Apollo 17 astronauts: He noticed that moon dust smelled and wondered why no one had mentioned it before. Eventually he realized it was a cultural thing: In pilot culture, "out of the ordinary" can get you grounded, where "out of the ordinary" is what science culture is all about. And the early Apollo astronauts were all pilots, mostly test pilots.

          It only takes one curious person to open a new door and most of us don't notice the door is there, even if we pass it by every day of our lives.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by modecx (130548)
      Ozone, to me, has a distinctly un-sweet smell. I mean, stick your head over a photo-copier going at full speed and you get ozone. I can't stand the stuff for any length of time, really.

      I also arc-weld, and do all sorts of other welding, and I think the sweet smell you noticed is much more likely vaporization of the flux, filler rod, and base material, surface contaminants (or any combination of the above) than it is to be of ozone, because those are produced in much higher quantities than ozone, and here

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RDW (41497)
      'The human nose can be an extremely strong tool for some individuals, perhaps this is more than just psychosomatic? It would drive me crazy to never investigate this if I were in his shoes.'

      The lunar astronauts have several theories on the (perhaps related) phenomenon of the smell of 'fresh' moondust, and seem quite interested in having this investigated further:

      http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/30jan_smellofmoondust.htm [nasa.gov]
    • Proto-Captain Garrovic(k) will impressed... as long as you don't have an "Obsession" that wastes hemoglobin

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by piojo (995934)

        "perhaps this is more than just psychosomatic?"

        I would imagine so - even if somehow you were able to "smell" a complete vacuum, your own body (including the nasal passages themselves) will be giving off odors. If they are so subtle as to normally be overwhelmed by the usual natural background, that may be your first chance to detect them.

        Well, we get used to whatever's around. When I went backpacking for a few weeks in the desert of Utah, I stopped smelling my own B.O., but I gained the ability to smell peanut butter through two plastic bags, ten feet away. It was pretty sweet. I'm sure the same increasing sensitivity happens to astronauts who live in a mostly sterile, boring, environment.

  • Good news, everyone! (Score:5, Funny)

    by El Yanqui (1111145) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:18AM (#22406144) Homepage
    Professor Farnsworth already proved it with the Smell-O-Scope.

  • Oblig Futurama (Score:4, Funny)

    by dkleinsc (563838) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:18AM (#22406148)
    Don Pettit: The guy from whom Prof Farnsworth stole the plans to the smelloscope.

  • smelloscope (Score:3, Funny)

    by GreatRedShark (880833) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:19AM (#22406180)
    So does this mean the Professor's smelloscope could one day be a reality? Gee, I'd hate to small Uranus.

  • outgassing of materials (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:20AM (#22406186)
    It is not 'space' one smells, but the gas from materials when exposed to high vacuum.
     
  • Try a little less Old Spice before putting on the spacesuit...
  • ...the inner space. Now that smells really weird!
  • The outer rim of Uranus also has a smell. It's described variously as a musky, pungent, zesty enterprise, with a splash of sulfur, that causes dizziness and nausea.

    And now... ladies and gentlemen... Carrot Top!!!

  • Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ancient_Hacker (751168) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:27AM (#22406302)
    I'd hope our space travelers would have a skosh better grasp of physics. The vacuum of near space is darn good, certainly lower than the vapor pressure of most anything we loft into space. Experience with evacuating radio and TV tubes says you can get up to 500 cm^3 of gas out of every few square inches of metal. I would not be surprised if he's smelling the outgassing of items from our earthly spehere, not the "smell of space".

    • Experience with evacuating radio and TV tubes says you can get up to 500 cm^3 of gas out of every few square inches of metal.
      Bravo! Not only mixing imperial and metric but areas and volume to boot!

      Sir, I take my hat off to you.
    • RTFA - it's really short, and was written in 2003, so you should have had plenty of time...

      Of course vacuum doesn't have a smell, and it's much more likely that the smell is from the way space suits react to being in vacuum than gasses wafting up from earth getting stuck on them. Or it could be from some of those funky molds that grow on the space station. But that's not really relevant, because he's not writing about physics, he's writing about the experience of being in a space-ship, and smell is one of

      • Come on... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by majorgoodvibes (1228026) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @12:22PM (#22408050)
        The guy is one of the 0.001% that actually WORKS IN FREAKING SPACE. He's obviously qualified to do what he does. He wrote an innocuous little blog entry about some funny little thought that crossed his mind in the middle of WORKING IN FREAKING SPACE. It's not scientific, it's not meant to be something you reference in your term paper on "Olfactory Sensations in Vacuum or Near-Vacuum Conditions", it's not being submitted as proof that NASA needs more funding. It just is what it is.

        Someone else said this wasn't "worthy" of Slashdot. Maybe that's true but it doesn't make it stupid. It's just one of those millions of things that doesn't require enormous analysis. Blame whoever submitted it and gave it the headline.

  • Professor Farnsworth was right! (Score:3, Informative)

    by walterbyrd (182728) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:38AM (#22406452)
    I knew it!

    http://www.gotfuturama.com/Information/Encyc-21-SmellOScope/ [gotfuturama.com]
  • "The Sweet Smell of Space" sounds like something Heinlein would have written.

  • Smell isn't caused by chemicals in the air (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Junior J. Junior III (192702) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @10:46AM (#22406540) Homepage
    Smell is caused by chemicals in the air triggering olfactory receptors in our sense organs and causing sense data to be interpreted by the brain as an odor.

    If you take away the sense data, the brain is still interpreting something, namely the absence of data. It could be that this odor is simply how the brain handles a null dataset.

  • obligatory 2001 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mister Whirly (964219) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @11:02AM (#22406790) Homepage
    "Oh my God, it smells like stars!"

  • A more down to earth answer... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ms3e (1144199) on Wednesday February 13 2008, @11:09AM (#22406916)
    While it's intellectually fanciful to believe this is the "smell of outer space", what this guy is smelling is the odor of the compressed air used to re-pressurize the airlock, or more exactly, the smell of the inside of the metalic containers and pumps for the storage of the compressed air which the air picked up when contained under pressure before being introduced into the airlock. Take a whiff of compressed air from an air compressor or air tank... hmm, smells like space (apparently).

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