Space has a sweet, pleasing metallic smell– like your mom [The More You Know]

Considering that space is a vacuum and vacuum is nothing but nothing, one wouldn’t expect space to have a smell– but apparently it does.  Not that anyone has been able to stick their sniffer out the window of the space station like a beagle, but we can get a sense of what it smells like from the astronauts who have been there.

ISS Science Officer Don Petitt describes it this way:

I had the pleasure of operating the airlock for two of my crewmates while they went on several space walks. Each time, when I repressed the airlock, opened the hatch and welcomed two tired workers inside, a peculiar odor tickled my olfactory senses. At first I couldn’t quite place it. It must have come from the air ducts that re-pressed the compartment. Then I noticed that this smell was on their suit, helmet, gloves, and tools. It was more pronounced on fabrics than on metal or plastic surfaces. It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as “tastes like chicken.” The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.

Sweet and metallic?  Of course it’s possible that this could just be our little portion of space and other parts smell like cotton candy, sour apple, snozzberry and caramel.  But considering that pretty much the entire universe is mostly made out of metal in some form (the solid stuff at least), it’s not entirely surprising.

Via: NASA