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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."
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".
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.
astronaut flatulence... what's done about it?
do astronauts have to take anti-flatulence meds like Simethicone?
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.
A promotion path for the Iowa Nasal Rangers? Cool!
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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?
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!
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...
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.
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.
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?
It happens all the time with Navy people go to see for months on a submarine. Just think 150 poeple on a small steel tube with lots of equipment and chemicals and no windows!
:wq
Q: What is that awfull smell?
A.1: If it is the afternoon, it is a san being pumpled overboard.
A.2 If it is the morning, it is breakfast being coode!
-- Phase 1: Collect under pants Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit
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 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.
yea, I was reading that thinking "right. I'm sure that's the real reason.
On the other hand, I've yet to meet a dad who couldn't manage to ensure that he was doing less than half of the total stinky diapers, often by volunteering on the ones he knew wouldn't smell...
He's dead, Jim. You get his tricorder, I'll get his wallet.
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.
They shoot stuff in space that goes on tv. Some female astronauts proboblly feel much more comftorble on camera if they're wearing makeup.
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.