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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!
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.