Outer Space has a Smell

repapetilto writes "ISS Science Officer Don Pettit reports in his journal that outer space gives off a smell best described as "a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation." Kind of odd considering smell is supposed to be due to volatilized chemical compounds."

Comments

Sounds Like Ozone

[eldavojohn]

When I was younger, I also arc wielded to fix various metal things around farms. I too noticed this sweet, metallic smell.

When I was a teenager I read a lot of short stories. Especially all the sci-fi & horror ones like Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick or Stephen King. I don't recall which one it was but a character had a train set that had a short in it on the tracks. The arcing electricity would give off this same smell. I learned through this short story that this is an incidental way to produce ozone (O3), a greenhouse gas. And that the smell is in fact a low amount of ozone. Perhaps you've detected it at the dentists office or while operating an engine? From the Wikipedia entry:

Ozone may be formed from O2 by electrical discharges and by action of high energy electromagnetic radiation. Certain electrical equipment generate significant levels of ozone. This is especially true of devices using high voltages, such as ionic air purifiers, laser printers, photocopiers, and arc welders. Electric motors using brushes can generate ozone from repeated sparking inside the unit. Large motors that use brushes, such as those used by elevators or hydraulic pumps, will generate more ozone than smaller motors. I hope he doesn't write himself off as crazy if he did detect ozone. Or at least investigate where it could have come from. If there's tiny molecules of ozone floating around in orbit of the earth, I'm certain that would be scientifically interesting. Perhaps he should test the properties of these materials when exposed to ozone, do they attract the molecules? Or perhaps he should put the materials in a vacuum here on earth for a bit and then pull them out and see if he detects the same smell?

The human nose can be an extremely strong tool for some individuals, perhaps this is more than just psychosomatic? It would drive me crazy to never investigate this if I were in his shoes. It may seem trivial but sometimes a peculiar notion is what drives scientists make a novel discovery ... or waste lots and lots of time.

Re:Sounds Like Ozone

[ivan256]

That smell is also really bad for you. The Ozone oxidizes the inside of your nose and throat. If you breathe in a large quantity, you'll get a sore throat fairly quickly, and can die after several minutes in a room with a high concentration.

I have a commercial ozone generator that I bought to use after my basement flooded to kill the mold. I had it on a timer for a while to run for an hour at night. Power went out, the timer got offset, and I went down there during the day while it was on. One lungful and I had a sore throat for a week.

Smell isn't caused by chemicals in the air

[Junior J. Junior III]

Smell is caused by chemicals in the air triggering olfactory receptors in our sense organs and causing sense data to be interpreted by the brain as an odor.

If you take away the sense data, the brain is still interpreting something, namely the absence of data. It could be that this odor is simply how the brain handles a null dataset.