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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."
i would think its the opposite. usually a sense is heightened the more you use it.
-caf
Hey, you ever sat next to a smelly person on a coast to coast flight? Imagine being locked in a space capsule with them.
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.
Although it's very fine and noble to try to minimize unpleasant odours aboard spacecraft, what can be done about us stinky mammals? Humans supposedly produce half a litre of gastrointestinal gas daily -- I would imagine that in an enclosed space occupied by several humans, that could get unpleasant quickly.
Farts!
I wonder if a mission has ever been scrubbed because he got a cold and couldn't smell?
Evolution or ID?
Sixteen healthy subjects volunteered to eat pinto beans and insert small plastic collection tubes into their anuses .... After each "episode of flatulence," Levitt syringed the gas into a discrete container, rigorously maintaining fart integrity
A fart in a jar?! I didn't know that was actually possible.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Shut it with the puns or I am going to start punching people.
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.
It's pretty sad when you consider that his nose is more reliable than the Space Shuttle....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Which they do... The article says they run things through a mass spectrometer first to determine toxicity. But the true offensiveness of an odor can't be determined by a machine. For instance, I can eat alot of garlic and be bothered by it later. My mom has a little bit and complains for hours she reeks of garlic. It takes a few human noses to determine if something is going to be offensive in closed, recirculated quarters such as the Shuttle or the ISS.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
That's interesting. However, in some cases our sense of smell protects us. For example, when you smell leaking gas etc.
If astronauts were to use this spray to mask the smell from a particular non-hazardous source, they may be unable to detect, say, a fainter smell that could be from something potentially hazardous.
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
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.