Issue 561 Smell and Space!!! April 2, 2015

I seriously should have saved this one for April 1st, but whatever, I am doing it the day after.  I wanted to get away from the serious stuff of the week for a day and discuss an interesting segment on the Science channel show Worlds Strangest: Jobs.  And one of those jobs was a smell tester for NASA.  Allow me to explain what the documentary explained.

Why does NASA have a smell tester?:  Well the reason is simple, in an enclosed space, smells can actually cause a person harm. Some of the typical side effects are nausea, discomfort and possibly even blistering.  Here on earth, those smells dissipate due to air currents and thus can't harm us, but when smells can't extinguish, or dilute like in a space station, then there is a problem.  In fact, a soviet space mission was cancelled one month early do to a terrible smell on board.  So that costs money and shows how important smell really is.  

How they test smells:  They actually have professional smell testers.  These people literally smell each object to measure their toxicity and these men and women are routinely tested every few months to insure their noses are in peak condition (yea, I am being serious).  To test an object they bake it for three days and then a panel of smell testers smell the baked object and measure that smell on a scale of zero to four.  If the smell is rated two and a half or higher, then the object cannot go into space.  For example, an astronaut wanted to bring his CD collection into space, but could not because the chemical smell given off was deemed too toxic to bring up (it potentially could have caused blistering in the nose).  

Conclusion:  It was a very cool segment (at least for me) because who really thought that smells could be so harmful.  I sure as heck did not.  But smell on a space station or in space is extremely important as a neutral smell environment means that astronauts can literally sniff out problems that occur (such as the smell of burning wires and the like).  So when we begin to colonize space, this job will become all that much more important.  Thus my readers with really good senses of smell, you may want to start applying.