Researchers are currently analyzing the smell of space – from Earth's neighbors to planets hundreds of light-years away – to better understand how the universe is constructed.
The atmosphere on Saturn's moon Titan is believed to smell like sweet almond, gasoline, and rotting fish. Jupiter smells "a bit like a stink bomb," says Marina Barcenilla, space researcher at the University of Westminster in the UK. Jupiter has several cloud layers with different chemical compositions and can initially tempt with a sweet scent of "toxic marzipan clouds," but the deeper you go, the worse the smell becomes.
You would probably wish you were dead before you were crushed by the pressure, she says to the British public service company BBC.
She believes that the uppermost cloud layer consists of ammonia ice, with a stench reminiscent of cat urine. Further down is ammonium sulfide, a mixture of ammonia and sulfur – "a combination from hell," according to Barcenilla.
Smells like rotten eggs
After spacewalks, astronauts have felt a particular smell. Some describe it as charred meat, gunpowder, or burned electrical cables.
At the Russian space station Mir, it was almost odorless. In microgravity, warm air does not rise, so scents do not spread. You have to "stick your nose in the package" to smell the food, says Helen Sharman, Britain's first astronaut.
Created when stars die
After a spacewalk, when Sharman brought in samples through the airlock, she smelled the smell of metal.
It reminded me of a car factory. I could smell the smell of welding – that metallic smell in the air, she says to BBC.
The cause of the smell is still unknown. One theory is that it is caused by oxidation, where atomic oxygen in the Earth's thin outer atmosphere plays a role.
It is the same molecules that are formed when you burn food – PAHs – that also occur when stars die. They then float around in space and smell like solvents or burning plastic. For Sherman, the return journey from space was important in terms of smell:
We landed on a wormwood bush in Kazakhstan. The fresh air when we opened the hatch was absolutely fantastic. It smelled wonderful, absolutely lovely.
