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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."
that Febreze would be a cheaper solution...
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
He should post his profile on Dogster.com. Sniff. Sniff.
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.
It certainly sounds like he nose what he's doing.
Seems to me it was Soyuz 21?
That's a pretty vague word to describe a smell.
Imagine that - the perfect smell. Eau de Space - available in 75 ml bottles.
Hey, you ever sat next to a smelly person on a coast to coast flight? Imagine being locked in a space capsule with them.
astronaut flatulence... what's done about it?
do astronauts have to take anti-flatulence meds like Simethicone?
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?"
Jack just slipped a stinker! Awful egg-ish odor! Requesting permission to abort mission!
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.
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?
I am sure its not as bad as flatus odor judge !!
Free XBox, PS2
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.
10. 34-year-old Tang someone left in orbit after one of the apollo missions
9. Dmitri's socks
8. Even in space, monkeys fling poo
7. When Galactus forgets to use deoderant, half the quadrant knows about it
6. Someone left the windows in MIR open again
5. Venturing too close to the Onion Planet
4. "The Phantom Menace"
3. Smell bits of alien underwear (thank you Douglas Adams)
2. Saddam's WMDs hidden on Mars (see today's Mars news items)
1. And the number one stinky problem in space: "Star Trek: Voyager"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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...
Do the astronauts get lonely or something? Teddy bears?
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.
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.
I've got four grandchildren and when my wife's changing their diapers I try to stay far enough away from her to avoid the smell, because I try not to shock my nose.
Who wouldn't love to have that excuse.
Sorry, no nose, no job. I have to protect it.
Aldrich has smelled stuffed animals, cameras, film, grease, oil, tampons, toothpaste, aftershave, an IBM laptop, cosmonaut Alexander Lazutkin's photo album, and Disposable Absorption Containment Trunks (adult diapers for space walks).
:)
Perfect for anyone with a weird fetish.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
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.
And here I thought NASA had technology to take care of this remotely.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
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.
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
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