Outer Space has a Smell 274
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."
Sounds Like Ozone (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
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
Re:Sounds Like Ozone (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Smell isn't caused by chemicals in the air (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Smell isn't caused by chemicals in the air (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well, that makes for a good sci fi book title (Score:2, Interesting)
Nothing like the smell on ISS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sounds Like Ozone (Score:2, Interesting)
Origin of Ozone in the Ozone layer [wikipedia.org]
Re:Sounds Like Ozone (Score:3, Interesting)
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:3, Interesting)
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]
He's writing about the *Experience*, not physics (Score:3, Interesting)
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 those things that tie in to emotions and memory.
Other astronauts have made similar comments.
Re:Sounds Like Ozone (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sounds Like Ozone (Score:3, Interesting)
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.