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."
Seems to me it was Soyuz 21?
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?"
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*
I am sure its not as bad as flatus odor judge !!
Free XBox, PS2
That is true unless you are smelling toxins or very caustic substances. Or you're a smoker...
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Light on surfaces (esp paint, ink) causes them to outgas. UV light wreaks havoc on plastics and other resins.
And while the crew cabins are likely temperature controlled, much of the craft wouldnt be, like the parts that recirculate air.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
In this case, they meant that his sense of smell was flawless, in that he was never off. From the articles I'd say that he was compared to the average human reaction, or the other people testing the odors.
At no point in the articles does it describe an odor as "flawless". Wired just states that they were 771 "official" missions, and the only one to list them as flawless is the weblog cited.
He's dead, Jim. You get his tricorder, I'll get his wallet.
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".
If you were to RTFA you would learn that he does in fact need to prepare himself and that he callibrates his nose at the beginning of this mission. Also, how awesome is it that someone's job involves them CALLIBRATING THEIR NOSE? Very awesome.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
IIRC he complained a lot about the awful smell. Although I couldn't find anything directly related to that, in this report he talks about related problems (vomiting, waste disposal).
Apart from the smells induced by the bright idea of a curry for dinner, there also come to be chunks of poo floating around when someone fails to use the zero-g toilet properly. You see, poo don't fall down without gravity. Ahem.
Believe it or not, there are regulations concerning things that can and cannot be brought onboard a submarine. Ask a submariner what an "atmospheric contaminant" is. Things like shoe polish, aerosols, super glue, and masking tape. NASA should be recruiting some of these guys as consultants.
Yep. The internal temperature is mostly constant, yes, but not perfectly so. There are parts of the Shuttle that are less-than-perfectly insulated, and there are areas that are exposed to sunlight through windows. All of those areas are going to expand and contract during the day/night cycle. That expansion and contraction will squeeze objects like a sponge on a microscopic scale, resulting in much more rapid outgassing than you see under most conditions on earth.
Day/night cycle aside, smell is a much bigger problem just because it's a confined space with lots of people and equipment...and you can't open the windows.
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.
The astronauts don't get to hear the silence of space. They're aboard a small and very active spacecraft. In addition to the noise from the air handlers, there's going to be all kinds of sound just from the other astronauts doing experiments, preparing equipment, and chatting. I'd be quite surprised if most of them didn't wear earplugs to sleep.
~Idarubicin