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."
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.
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...
One thing's for sure: this man has never worked as a sniffer on board a submarine! If he had, he would have lost that keen sense of smell. After a deployment, even the crew's loved ones have a tough time being around them! It's like a gym locker room that never gets cleaned.