Nostrildamus

Scientific American has a column about a guy who has the duty of smelling materials that go into space, to make sure the astronauts won't end up gagging from odors that might disperse in the atmosphere on Earth but be concentrated in the Shuttle or space station.

Comments

*SNORT*

[odaiwai]

I used to work with a guy who'd sniff bicycle seats for jollies. I guess he went to work for NASA...

dave

How does one even apply for this sort of job?

[LordArathres]

We all about these weird jobs all the time. I mean how on earth or space does one apply for a position which really takes no physical effort or mental strain? What would the previos work experiance for this person be after they left NASA.

Please list your previous positions...

I used to smell for NASA. Using my sense of smell my duty was to decide if a certain smell might cause astronauts to gag on the smell in a more concentrated environment.

Hmm ok. How will this help the janitoral position you are applying for?

I can tell you on a scale of 1 to 10 how much this shit smells?

Sounds good. Your'e Hired.

Arathres


I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!

Re:How does one even apply for this sort of job?

[Brian See]

Oh, I'm sure we could cook up some great sounding resume entries.

How does:

Directed and supervised team engaged in assessment of olfactory hazards and irritants in controlled environments used in aerospace industry.

sound???

But remember (read the article), this guy is a "chemistry laboratory technician" whose job 90% of the time is probably a little more serious. (read the article). I can't imagine that this is his full-time position, although I suppose coordinating the panels and tabulating results could generate a lot of administrative work.

WEll,

[Jailbrekr]

I guess they can stop planning that Mexican cook off on the ISS..........

No mental strain? I think not.

[Roy Ward]

> I mean how on earth or space does one apply for a position which really takes no physical effort or mental strain?

It must take a bit of concentration to rank smells like that, even on a scale of 0-4, as we are not really designed for it . Unlike sight or hearing, smell is really a background sense - we are not used to paying analytical attention to it.

I wouldn't want to do the job for too long at once, both from the sense of smell getting jaded, and concentration wandering.

Roy Ward.

Re:No mental strain? I think not.

[ocbwilg]

The company I work for is in the food business, and I happen to work at their R&D facilities. At any rate, when they are developing new products they usually do a whole range of sensory panels so that they can provide the consumer with the most pleasing experience possible. We often have sensory panels where anybody in the company can come in and do a taste/smell/sight/texture test, but we also have an elite group of sensory experts who are called in for special sensory panels. While they are the expert panel, their usual jobs are things like "Packaging Engineer," "QA Tester," "Process Development Engineer," etc. It's not anybody's full-time job, but the elite group have been given special training to allow them to be more effective. I imagine that NASA is doing something similar.

An Interesting Story....

[Catmeat]

When Apollo 8 splashed down after flying round the moon in December 1968, the diver who had the job of opening the hatch as the capsule bobbed up and down in the ocean came close to throwing up from the smell inside.

Three guys in a small, sealed space for 12 days, using toilets that where essentially hi-tech plastic bags. Makes you shudder just to think aboout it.

Suprizingly...

[selectspec]

John Glenn passed his test.

Re:Lower quality in Scientific American!!!

[plover]

I was wondering if it was just my perception or if the magazine really had hit the black-diamond downhill run.

The new editor seems to have decided that Scientific Americans are as dumb and brash as the worldwide stereotypes suggest, and that he can't go wrong by lowering it further. (P.T. Barnum would suggest that he's right.)

John Rennie has also decided to preach from his new pulpit, and while I don't disagree much with his politics, they have absolutely no place in a magazine that's supposed to be presenting science, not politics. The previous editor had been a touch more subtle in making his political viewpoints known, but I had been finding that distasteful for the last few years. Now, instead of simply an editorial on nuclear power or an article on the uses of placental blood, the feature articles themselves are on the ethics of using medical waste, or treaty rights arguments over the use of Yucca Mountain as a permanent nuclear storage facility. Wake up, guys, Oprah and Larry King have already covered those topics. Let the Law Review cover them. Stick to the science, please.

What do you suppose happened? Is geek-chic such an "in" thing that carrying an unread Scientific American in your briefcase is now a fashion accessory? Perhaps these weenies got puzzled when they bothered to crack one open and found polysyllabic words in a column marked "Mathematical Recreations"?

Damn, and I just hit the switch on their new perennial no-spam-just-bill-my-Visa after tiring of 15 years of "OHMYGOD, your subscription will expire in 11 months! Resubscribe now to avoid the loss of just eight more issues!"

John, disgusted too.

Re:Why not a dog?

[ocbwilg]

I'm kinda surprised that NASA is using a human to do this. I didn't read the article yet, so perhaps this is a waste. Aren't we, as humans, one of the more under-developed species when it comes to olafactory senses?

Most of us are, yes. But then that's the trick isn't it? You can't have a dog tell you that something stinks because dogs cannot talk. You could build a sniffer machine to test the smell, but then it ends up having a wider range of detectability than a human nose, and it still can't tell you if something smells really awful.

Nope, if you want to see if something smells bad to a human being, then you pretty much are best of (economically and effectively) using humans as testers.

Blown Just A Wee Bit Out of Proportion

[TOTKChief]

Okay, yeah, so these guys do their job to protect that 'stronauts. Nice. Much more important is the testing that goes on beforehand for things that could kill them. A nice story, but a bit, well, fluffy.

I work with the guys at Marshall Space Flight Center who do toxicity testing pretty regularly. Offgassing is a huge concern, up there with flammability. [Stuff that doesn't burn in Earth's atmosphere will burn in the ISS/STS atmosphere, especially ISS, which runs at 25.3% oxygen.