Outer Space has a Smell

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."

outgassing of materials

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not 'space' one smells, but the gas from materials when exposed to high vacuum.
 

Huh?

[Ancient_Hacker]

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".

Re:Sounds Like Ozone

[gwait]

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!

Propellants from Shuttle and Soyuz?

[_bug_]

What's the likelihood this smell comes from propellants used by the shuttle and soyuz? Seems to me since his only interaction with this smell is from spacesuits that have only had contact with the "air" around the outside of the ISS.

Come on...

[majorgoodvibes]

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.

Re:Implied Lisa?

[somersault]

Well, it was funny to me. That's a shame that that happened (and no, I didn't know about it before just now), but if you personalise every joke then you're never going to laugh at anything. Explosive diarrhea is funny (though having part of your intestine sucked out is obviously not).

Diff between pilots and scientists

[myvirtualid]

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:Implied Lisa?

[provigilman]

Yes, remind me to bring that up to my bank next time I have a "negative balance". The term is just there to imply that there's a pressure differential, with the lower pressure being the "negative" one.