Slashdot Mirror
Meet the Nasalnaut
Roland Piquepaille writes "George Aldrich works at NASA and is not an astronaut. Instead, he's a 'master sniffer.' He tests everything that goes up in space on the shuttle or on the ISS for smelliness, from tennis shoes to teddy bears, and from refrigerators to socks or mascara. Why? Because things smell different in spacecrafts which experience a full day/night cycle every 90 minutes. And bad odors into a spacecraft can even lead to the abortion of a mission, like it happened to a Russian mission back in 1976. Wired Magazine tells us more about NASA's nasalnaut, a man whose colleagues call "Most Smella Fella" and has performed 771 flawless smelling missions. This overview contains more details and selected excerpts from a previous interview with Aldrich given to New Scientist. It also includes a picture showing how the NASA's nasalnaut smells things."
Wow, 771 FLAWLESS smelling missions. Our tax dollars at work.
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
that Febreze would be a cheaper solution...
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
Can't we just give the astronauts nose plugs and be done with it?
He should post his profile on Dogster.com. Sniff. Sniff.
to CowboyNeal's house.
771 flawless missions. That is actually pretty impressive, you'd think someone's sense of smell would degrade after so much time and so many tests. I wonder if he has to prepare himself in any way before he carries out one of these "missions".
My best was 584.4 :p
It stinks!!
771 flawless missions? Something doesn't smell right here...
There was a story in Analog back around '86 that dealt with odors in space. In this case the cook had smuggled garlic on board a ship, despite a ban on it's use.
It revealed the presence of alien parasites when it turned out they were allergic to the garlic.
Story or not though, the idea of being trapped in a small ship with someone reeking of garlic, curry, and onions is enough to make me consider purging the atmosphere.
It certainly sounds like he nose what he's doing.
especially on long trips. I can imagaine astronauts, already stressed out from two months of close confinement on their way to Mars, going crazy because of a serious case of B.O.
Seems to me it was Soyuz 21?
That's a pretty vague word to describe a smell.
Imagine that - the perfect smell. Eau de Space - available in 75 ml bottles.
astronaut flatulence... what's done about it?
do astronauts have to take anti-flatulence meds like Simethicone?
The shuttle uses a variety of devices to remove solid and not so solid waste from the crew. There was one mission where the fan which drives the system failed. While it did not end the mission, it was sure a stinky trip.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
is there a slashdot smellinaut, who smells dorks, that smell like silicon, ozone, and spunk, and has hundreds of successful missions?
Jack just slipped a stinker! Awful egg-ish odor! Requesting permission to abort mission!
Just a little tidbit. This article was nearly posted a couple of hours ago -- it showed up as a "Mysterious Future" article at about 1:45 Eastern time. Then it was yanked -- see my journal for other "Ghosts of Slashdot", articles that got yanked just before going live.
I guess someone realized that the NASA news conference was just about to begin, and that we didn't really need to have the two stories back-to-back.
There's a lot of whining about Slashdot's editors. This article's hidden history shows that they're not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs and posting dupes. As I'm sure someone has suggested before -- if you're so upset, go make your own "news for nerds" site!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Slashdot should add a nasalnaut to its roster. S/he would sniff out the bullshit coming from the editors, and appropriately approve or reject their stories.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
A promotion path for the Iowa Nasal Rangers? Cool!
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
My cousin has worked on a fishing boat for years, he's not an aquanaut, he's a "master baiter".
Well at least he is not manually m@5+rub@+3ing , caged animals for artificial insemination.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I think I speak for us all when I say, these are some of the worst puns I've ever heard.
God bless you, Nasalnauts. *tear*
Does he eat space food, then wait 12-24 hours, and analyze the smell coming from his restroom to determine which space-foods produce the least smelly farts?
I am sure its not as bad as flatus odor judge !!
Free XBox, PS2
And bad odors into a spacecraft can even lead to the abortion of a mission
DAMNIT Jim, I TOLD you not to eat that broccoli!!!
bash: rtfm: command not found
Indian food, you can smell it from the adjacent apartment complex. I remember taking the trash out during a curry making session and as I was walking back wondering "What the hell is that smell?"....Then I figured it out. :)
I'd have a problem of being stuck in space with someone with a GI problem or bad personal hygiene.
But onions, garlic, ginger, etc are the best!
The astronauts wear diapers when they are out doing their space walks and that type of thing.
Why do they wear diapers?
Anything that goes inside the capsule. We do things like paints, magic markers, ink, fabrics, epoxies.
Paint and magic markers eh... Just how much of this does he do? Can't be healthy that's for sure.
10. 34-year-old Tang someone left in orbit after one of the apollo missions
9. Dmitri's socks
8. Even in space, monkeys fling poo
7. When Galactus forgets to use deoderant, half the quadrant knows about it
6. Someone left the windows in MIR open again
5. Venturing too close to the Onion Planet
4. "The Phantom Menace"
3. Smell bits of alien underwear (thank you Douglas Adams)
2. Saddam's WMDs hidden on Mars (see today's Mars news items)
1. And the number one stinky problem in space: "Star Trek: Voyager"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I wonder if a mission has ever been scrubbed because he got a cold and couldn't smell?
Evolution or ID?
Stink, the final fronteer.
Capt'n Jean Luc Picknose and the crew of the Stinkerprize are on a five year mission.
To Hell with the prime directive Number One, put on some deoderant!
Coming back from the moon, an astronaut once remarked that, going back into the Command Module some 30 minutes after it had splashed-down and was recovered, he was taken aback by the smell. "My god! How could I have stood that smell for so long???" he asked himself...
This is why you would want to be choosy about which nations you go into space with. Some just plain stink.
There used to be this french guy at work. Everybody called him "Camembert". To this day he thinks it's because he's french.
while sco {
wget -O
}
what the Rock is cooking?
I've just invented the smelloscope!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
You now qualify for the skill "Snorting III: Advanced Nasal Recognition".
Finally someone can answer the question:
"Who got da funk?"
Send whiskey and fresh horses!
If you rub garlic on someones feet while they sleep, they will wake up smelling and tasting garlic - alegedly.
Sleep deprevation seems to affect ones sense of smell sometimes. As does MSG in your food.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
I wonder what other jobs somebody like this would do though? How would you qualify for this type of Nasa "mission".
Do the astronauts get lonely or something? Teddy bears?
Not sure why this popped up in here, but it is a fun game.. And I beat you with 586.1 :)
OK, maybe it's just me, but isn't sending things to low Earth orbit still $10k/lb?
WHY ARE WE SENDING MAKEUP TO SPACE?!
Even at a few ounces, a mascara bottle is dead weight. surely there's some nut or bolt that they'd love to have a spare of up there instead.
So, we're supposed to believe that because the sun rises and sets every 90 minutes things smell differently? The station isn't exactly a sun porch, and the temperature is maintained pretty constant, so I just don't really buy what that has to do with anything. Am I to believe that fruit ripens faster and you need to shower more often because your hair greases up every 90 minutes? If things smell it's because it's an closed system. Noise is probably a much bigger issue. In the quietness of space the soft whir of a fan in the ventelation system will sound like a 747.
Making funny noises & stinking out your friends & coworkers is one of life's simple pleasures.
Sounds like a candidate for The Worst Jobs in Science.
Although, he can tell people he works for NASA, and leave it at that.
...don't question it!!!
everybody wants to know is who is SCO suing today!
Okay, I lied, that guy is pretty cool to go around
and sniff stuff.
Master Sniffer George Aldrich recently slipped into a comba after standing downwind of CowboyNeals ass. His condition is critical.
I do believe that should be "aborting of a mission".
I've got four grandchildren and when my wife's changing their diapers I try to stay far enough away from her to avoid the smell, because I try not to shock my nose.
Who wouldn't love to have that excuse.
Sorry, no nose, no job. I have to protect it.
You goddamned Micro$oft schills are now stooping so low as to promote cruelty to animals as a fun pastime?!!! FOR SHAME!!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
With sweat, flatulance, possible vomit and diarrhea, you would think that the worst smells would be from the astronauts themselves. Do they also test the odors coming off people? Do they have to carefully monitor astronauts' diets so that they won't produce foul sweat or gases?
Aldrich has smelled stuffed animals, cameras, film, grease, oil, tampons, toothpaste, aftershave, an IBM laptop, cosmonaut Alexander Lazutkin's photo album, and Disposable Absorption Containment Trunks (adult diapers for space walks).
:)
Perfect for anyone with a weird fetish.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Although this may seem like a silly, simple little thing, it highlights just how complex space travel is. Consider all the variables in this "smell testing" alone. "How long does a certain amount of substance X have to be exposed in a given volume of air at what temperature to accurately demonstrate how 'smelly' it would be on a spacecraft?" The mind boggles... Mars may be on the horizon, but it's a long way off.
And here I thought NASA had technology to take care of this remotely.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I was curious and googled. Here is what I found:
J /l lda.html
According to other Russian reports, at least three missions have been aborted for reasons that were in part psychological. In one case, the Soyuz 21 mission to the Salyut 5 space station in 1976, the crew was brought home early after the cosmonauts complained fiercely of an acrid odor in the space station's environmental control system. No cause was ever found, nor did other crews smell it; conceivably it was a hallucination. Coincidentally, the crew had not been getting along. In the case of the Soyuz T-14 mission to Salyut 7 in 1985, the crew was brought home after 65 days when Vladimir Vasyutin complained that he had a prostate infection and couldn't urinate. Later, doctors felt that the problem was partly psychological. Vasyutin had been getting behind in his work, and he was also under pressure because he had been passed over for a flight several times before. Alexander Laveikin was brought back early from the Soyuz TM-2 mission to Mir in 1987 because he complained of a cardiac irregularity. According to flight surgeons, there had been no sign of it before flight, nor could they find any sign of it in flight or afterwards. The cosmonaut had been under stress--he had made a couple of potentially serious errors. Later, he complained of the arrhythmia. He also had not been getting along with his partner, Yuri Romanenko.
A good deal of this information is undocumented and anecdotal; it makes for good stories, but not necessarily for great psychology. U.S. psychologists sometimes fault their Russian colleagues for being stronger on anecdotes than on verifiable experiments or statistics. "Rumor, rumor, rumor," one Western psychologist said to me recently, shaking his head, when I asked him about these tales.
http://www.airspacemag.com/ASM/Mag/Index/1996/J
I think the article writer was just trying to be creative (or something like that). In the pictures I've seen, the astronauts don't look particularly made up. I really doubt they bring mascara.
According to:
7 50 88017658.html
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/27/10
According to Henry Cooper, who wrote a book, A House in Space, on the loneliness of the long-distance astronaut, at least three missions have been aborted for reasons that were in part psychological. In the 1976 Soyuz- 21 mission to the Salyut-5 space station, the crew was brought home early after the cosmonauts complained fiercely of an acrid odour in the space station's environmental control system. No cause was ever found, nor did other crews smell it; conceivably, it was a hallucination. Coincidentally, the crew had not been getting along.
that didnt even occur to me. must be all the mind-numbing work ive had to do today.
-caf
Anybody remember the days when /. used to have the odd item about programming?
....nobody can smell your socks.
wbs.
Huh?
I once had the misfortune to visit a diesel sub.
The first thing I noticed was the foul, *foul* odor.
Its a wonder people could crew those things without having their noses cauterised.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Things smell different around Uranus
My Karma is so low that even my own postings are beyond my current threshold
overheard him say
Table-ized A.I.
"And moving on, this is George Aldrich, hes sniffing the astronaughts underwear, but dont worry kids, he doesnt have a fetish: this where we do our smell testing."
--Insert replies about geeks stinking and Natalie Portmans panties.
end.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
What do farts smell like in zero gravity?
Smells are all about molecules becoming airborne.
It seems to me that NASA is after things with a low volatility index.
Why don't they put the object in question in a closed container and then cycle the air through a mass spectrometer to see what's in there and in what concentration.
Actually, I'm not sure if the mass spec can tell you concentration, but I'm pretty sure it can.
You will then have a qualitative and repeatable method of testing.
Absolute statements are never true
What kind of things have you rejected?
We rejected some mascaras from Sally Ride. She was the first American female astronaut and we tested a lot of things for her.
From the New Scientist artical.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
The parent post is not exactly a troll and makes sense enough to be moderated as interesting. However, nobody wants to see some idiot gaining karma points by mooching off of some other persons opinions/ideas. Shouldnt there be some mechanism whereby the post is modded up but the poster does not get the mod points? Or at least some reporting interface that will blacklist the poster for having copied the post verbatim... Note, if the poster had given due credit to the original post, it probably would have been okay.
parent is disgruntled treckie
Where Martin Short was shrunk and shoved up Dennis Quaid's nose, or something like that? And he had to fight stinky boogers?
Sounds like something you'd name your finger.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I see nasalnauts a stop lights
I think there must be some medical solutions to temporarily reduce human sense of smell. Some nasal spray should be capable of disabling or outright killing chemoreceptors in our noses. When something really smelly is found in the space, [temporarily] losing the smell might be preferable to cancelling the mission.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
593 148.6 I'm gonna see if I can top these. H
his job really stinks.
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
Seriously, the next Mars mission should carry an odor sensor, so we can find out what the place smells like.
I mean, what if it turns out we'd have to terraform it with perfume?
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
He could have at least spoken about that time he got too close to the ass-tronaut.
Hands in my pocket
Can someone explain why the hell something would smell different when it's in a different light/dark cycle ??? Smell is particules of the matter you're smelling that reach your nose. Smelling dog shit is having some dog shit in your nose. Why would matter change because it's subjected to different light cycles??? sometimes i sleep 18 hours and stay up for 30 (lasts about a week) ... why doesnt my nose fuck up?
What about Professor Farnsworth's Smell-O-Scope? Combines the best of both worlds!
He tests everything that goes up in space on the shuttle or on the ISS for smelliness, from tennis shoes to teddy bears, and from refrigerators to socks or mascara.
Why exactly is NASA sending up mascara? And do our astronauts really need darker lashes up in space?
Coincidentaly, I believe there have been studies that have consistantly found women to be better smellers than men.
w00t. I got 593.5 and 148.5.
I swear. I spent 30 minutes accomplishing this feat. It is my belief that 593.5 is the highest possible score and that 148.5 is the lowest possible score. It is God's will.
Will I be the only one modded offtopic?
Monstromart: Where shopping is a baffling ordeal
[in 1976] ....
-Hello, Moscow?
-Moscow control here, go ahead.
-Uh, we have a bad smell up here.
-What?
-We can't take it anymore.
-WHAT?
-It's really bad, we must abort this multi-billion-ruble mission that's supposed to put the Americans in their place. Yuri ate Bush's Baked Beans, and he's farting all over the place, constantly!
-%(*#&(%*&#%(*%&(
[ silence ]
-[Soviet control] Listen to me, you little spoiled bastards. You dare come back to Earth and you'll wish you never came back. I don't care if you have shit up your nose. The mission _must_ go on!
Anyone _else_ doubt the Soviets aborted a mission due to smell? I don't see the US doing it, either. No matter how bad. And yes, your smell sensors are part of your brain. The only part that is directly exposed to the outside.
Must-not-watch TV!
The smelloscope?
Come on, people!
Good job. My numbers seem to indicate the same: 593.5 148.6 and the nose-dive distance of: 491.8 Check out this altered version of the game: Penguin batting
Eeek, just seconds after posting this I got a nosedive of 491.9.
Ok, I should really stop playing this...
492.5
492.5 nosedive
I know they do little pr videos from the shuttle, but is the mascara really necessary? Shouldn't they use that space and weight for antibiotics or something?
Some odors can make certain people physically ill. They can also make people psychologically ill. When you're stuck in a confined environment, little things can drive you nuts over an extended period of time. A crew that is angry or depressed can exhibit poor judgment and reduced performance. It isn't just the Russians, a crew on Skylab went on strike for a day as a protest against the way that they had been treated by ground control.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
**861.4** biotch!!!!
When I was a student, I had garlic 8 days in a row. I smelled. Years later, I gave up garlic and then met my wife.
Stick Men
this way /. can catalogue all the stories from the
last print issue just a few days before the new issue
is sent to subscribers.
It just seems hardly 'newsworthy' to link to stories
that have been out for three weeks already in print. If
you are going to play the 'oh look at these cool stories
in wired' game (or any other print pub). then at least
get it over with when its fresh.
Why? His (or anybody's) nose, like virtually all plant or animal sensory equipment, is an exquisitely designed and refined instrument that took (all told) billions of years to reach its current state. It's also perfectly suited to the task it's been given here (making judgements on behalf of a bunch of similar but generally less-sensitive other noses).
The Space Shuttle is a designed-by-committee bunch of individual machined parts whose combined history is for the most part less than a century old, and at most ten or twenty thousand years (it does have wheels, after all).
People often seem surprised that a dog's nose and brain (for instance) is more sensitive, trainable, and reliable than a chemical sniffer with a computer attached. I'm constantly surprised that they're surprised. We have altogether too much respect for our technology, and too little for ourselves (and our many relatives).
Think about how his nose grew from a single pair of gametes and it gets better.