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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."
Too bad the vacuum of space will suck that smell right out of your nose.
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
My work here is dung.
Professor Farnsworth already proved it with the Smell-O-Scope.
Well, thanks to the Internet, I'm now bored with sex.
Don Pettit: The guy from whom Prof Farnsworth stole the plans to the smelloscope.
I am officially gone from
So does this mean the Professor's smelloscope could one day be a reality? Gee, I'd hate to small Uranus.
It is not 'space' one smells, but the gas from materials when exposed to high vacuum.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: I'm afraid the Smelloscope can't locate Bender. His fragrance is too mild. It's being overwhelmed by local sources.
[Everyone looks at Zoidberg]
Dr. Zoidberg: Hooray! Now I'm the center of attention.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
...the inner space. Now that smells really weird!
It will soon be renamed Urectum.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
The outer rim of Uranus also has a smell. It's described variously as a musky, pungent, zesty enterprise, with a splash of sulfur, that causes dizziness and nausea.
And now... ladies and gentlemen... Carrot Top!!!
I'd hope our space travelers would have a skosh better grasp of physics. The vacuum of near space is darn good, certainly lower than the vapor pressure of most anything we loft into space. Experience with evacuating radio and TV tubes says you can get up to 500 cm^3 of gas out of every few square inches of metal. I would not be surprised if he's smelling the outgassing of items from our earthly spehere, not the "smell of space".
n/t
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I knew it!
http://www.gotfuturama.com/Information/Encyc-21-SmellOScope/
"The Sweet Smell of Space" sounds like something Heinlein would have written.
This space available.
What's the likelihood this smell comes from propellants used by the shuttle and soyuz? Seems to me since his only interaction with this smell is from spacesuits that have only had contact with the "air" around the outside of the ISS.
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.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Slightly offtopic, but I've heard that the air filters on ISS only scrub harmful CO2, CO, etc., but plenty of other odors persist, making you almost vomit when you first open the hatch. Of course you get used to it after a bit, but can you imagine being one of those tourists who paid $25+ million to spend a week in a fart tank?
No, I think he means explode. You cant implode if there's negative outside pressure.
"Oh my God, it smells like stars!"
"But this one goes to 11!"
While it's intellectually fanciful to believe this is the "smell of outer space", what this guy is smelling is the odor of the compressed air used to re-pressurize the airlock, or more exactly, the smell of the inside of the metalic containers and pumps for the storage of the compressed air which the air picked up when contained under pressure before being introduced into the airlock. Take a whiff of compressed air from an air compressor or air tank... hmm, smells like space (apparently).
Perhaps he was implying that the OP's brain was more empty than the vastness of space
which is totally what she said
Kirk: "How close will we come to the closest Klingon outpost if we continue on our present course."
Chekov: "One parsec sir. Close enough to smell them."
Spock: "That is illogical, ensign. Oders cannot travel through the vacuum of space."
http://www.badmovies.org/tvshows/startrek/tribbles/tribbles1.wav (135 KB)
Perhaps you meant to reply to my cure for constipation below - Method of curing constipation by exposure of bodily cavities to a powerful vacuum. Now that's gonna cause an asplosion.
which is totally what she said
There's no such thing as negative pressure, just like there's no such thing as negative temperature or volume either...
Of course vacuum doesn't have a smell, and it's much more likely that the smell is from the way space suits react to being in vacuum than gasses wafting up from earth getting stuck on them. Or it could be from some of those funky molds that grow on the space station. But that's not really relevant, because he's not writing about physics, he's writing about the experience of being in a space-ship, and smell is one of those things that tie in to emotions and memory.
Other astronauts have made similar comments.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The guy is one of the 0.001% that actually WORKS IN FREAKING SPACE. He's obviously qualified to do what he does. He wrote an innocuous little blog entry about some funny little thought that crossed his mind in the middle of WORKING IN FREAKING SPACE. It's not scientific, it's not meant to be something you reference in your term paper on "Olfactory Sensations in Vacuum or Near-Vacuum Conditions", it's not being submitted as proof that NASA needs more funding. It just is what it is.
Someone else said this wasn't "worthy" of Slashdot. Maybe that's true but it doesn't make it stupid. It's just one of those millions of things that doesn't require enormous analysis. Blame whoever submitted it and gave it the headline.
Well, it was funny to me. That's a shame that that happened (and no, I didn't know about it before just now), but if you personalise every joke then you're never going to laugh at anything. Explosive diarrhea is funny (though having part of your intestine sucked out is obviously not).
which is totally what she said
Don't get so butt hurt over it. Oh yeah, I went there
It's an operational definition referring to the relationship between the relative pressures of a system and its surroundings (usually atmospheric pressure). Never heard of negative volume.
After over 40 years in space this is the first guy to bring this up?? Hm... Smells fishy if you ask me..
Reminds me of an anecdote from one the Apollo 17 astronauts: He noticed that moon dust smelled and wondered why no one had mentioned it before. Eventually he realized it was a cultural thing: In pilot culture, "out of the ordinary" can get you grounded, where "out of the ordinary" is what science culture is all about. And the early Apollo astronauts were all pilots, mostly test pilots.
It only takes one curious person to open a new door and most of us don't notice the door is there, even if we pass it by every day of our lives.
I'm here EdgeKeep Inc.
Yes, remind me to bring that up to my bank next time I have a "negative balance". The term is just there to imply that there's a pressure differential, with the lower pressure being the "negative" one.
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang