Hello, is anyone grilling?: This is what it smells like in the room

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The universe consists mainly of an airless vacuum. So there is hardly any place in the room where you can smell anything at all. Nevertheless, some astronauts describe unusual smells encountered during their expeditions.

During the Apollo moon landings, astronauts often smelled a gunpowder-like odor as they climbed through the airlock to their lunar module and removed their helmets. Similarly, astronauts returning to the International Space Station (ISS) after a spacewalk report the smell of gunpowder, ozone, and burnt steak.

Different explanations

Hello, is anyone grilling? The magazine space.com describes where these cosmic smells come from. Space is full of all kinds of molecules, some of which have a strong odor when we smell them on Earth.

Scientists believe that during an astronaut’s spacewalk, individual oxygen atoms may stick to their spacesuit. When it then returns to the airlock and increases pressure again, molecular oxygen (O) flows.₂) – consisting of two oxygen atoms – into the airlock and combines with the individual oxygen atoms ozone (O₃). This would explain the sour, metallic smell astronauts describe.

Furthermore, it is suspected that so-called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are behind other odors. These are found in charred foods such as burnt toast and grilled meats. PAHs are also common in space, making them easy for astronauts to pick up and bring into the space station or a space capsule.

Rotten eggs, alcohol

However, scents also exist in more remote regions of space – if only you could travel far enough to smell them. When the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft encountered Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, it discovered a variety of molecules in the comet’s coma, the cloud of dust and gas surrounding its solid nucleus.

These molecules include hydrogen sulfide, which gives off the smell of rotten eggs, ammonia, which smells like urine, and hydrogen cyanide, which is toxic but has a pleasant almond-like odor. The spacecraft also found sweet-smelling carbon disulfide and acid-pungent formaldehyde.

Sagittarius B2, a giant molecular cloud of gas and dust near the center of the Milky Way, probably has a bit of a plume. It contains a lot of alcohol, including vinyl alcohol, methanol and ethanol. The latter is the type of alcohol that is also found in beer.

Source: Blick