Official News page 9

REAL LIFE NEWS: THE SMELL OF SPACE

by Hazed

Moving onto another sense: smell. In space, whether or not you can hear people scream, what can you smell? Apparently astronauts have variously described the smell of space as resembling fried steak, hot metal and even welding a motorbike. Obviously, that's not something anybody can directly smell since astronauts are never exposed to "raw space" - the vacuum would be hazardous to their health. But when astronauts have been outside and returned to the space station and taken off their helmets, they have reported quite particular odors - the aforementioned fried steak, hot metal and welding a motorbike!

Now NASA has commissioned a British chemist to recreate the fragrance of outer space, to add realism to the training sessions that help astronauts prepare for the conditions they will encounter in space. Steven Pearce of Omega Ingredients explained, "I did some work for an art exhibition in July, which was based entirely on smell and one of the things I created was the small of the inside of the Mir space station. NASA heard about it and contacted me to see if I could help them recreate the small of space to help their astronauts."

The project has proved technically challenging. The fried steak smell is easy, but Pearce admits "hot metal is proving more difficult. We think it's a high-energy vibration in the molecule and that's what we're trying to add to it now."

The smell of space should be finished by the end of the year.

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