Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Vulk bomb here, Every nutton bolt, every plastic zip tie, every container of tang that's part of a manned space mission has to be thoroughly checked out before it gets blasted into the stars. It only makes sense, right, Space is no place for surprises. Testing these things, all of them, and how they'll act and react and potentially hazardous environments falls on a veritable army of professionals at
NASA's White Sands Test facility in New Mexico. One group there, the Materials Flight Acceptance Workforce, analyzes the space suitability of different materials to make sure nothing will surprisingly catch on fire or put off some toxic gas, or act strangely in the near vacuum of space, or react poorly with other materials on board. All this is done with a
never wavering eye on the safety of astronauts. And then there's the testing area that's made the Materials Group a sort of quirky star in the NASA Solar System, the odor panel, what an astronaut smells in space, it turns out, is mission critical too. We spoke with Susannah Harper, the Materials Flight Accepted Standards testing manager at White Sands. She explained, if you don't like the smell of fish down here on the ground, you open a window and let it
air out. We don't have that option up in space. The potentially smelly halibut or a farting co pilot is unpleasant, but NASA is concerned with way more than simple stinkiness. Well. After all, some smells, especially in the relatively tight quarters of say the International Space Station or Oriyan, just can't be helped. Harper said. We want to make sure we're not creating an environment that's uncomfortable or bothersome to the
astronaut so they can be focused on their mission. But beyond the comfort of astronauts, which is important, NASA wants to keep unnecessary smells out of spacecraft for a more practical reason. Too many unfamiliar odors in a tiny space can mask odors that the astronauts need to detect, like perhaps a pneumonia leak or the smell of something burning. You can't have so many odors on board that the
astronauts missed the important stuff. Harper explained, our first line of detection is our human sense of smell, so even though we have worked with companies and there are certain types of detectors on board, in the end, we know that the human sense of smell is our most sensitive detector for those hazardous smells. NASA, through the Materials Group, has an odor panel that evaluates what can go up
into space and what's just two dar and stinky. Five volunteers put their shnazes to everything in the astronauts habitable space. The smell is captured first in an air chamber, then the air is injected through syringe directly into masks that each panel member wears. They then rank the smells zero being the least offensive, up to four for get this out of here. In order to determine what's allowable and what should be grounded, another group first tests the materials
for toxicity. Any odor over two point five fails. The panel's most decorated member is George Aldrich, a sixty four year old chemical specialist who's been sniffing around NASA for
some forty six years. He's lent his proboscis to more than nine different sit down smell tests, way more than anyone else ever, which has earned him a bunch of nicknames, including a nasal knot a few jaw dropping media appearances, including one in which he made like a police dog and seemingly impossibly sniffed out a mere smidget of drugs, and the admiration of astronauts. He was once given the Silver Snoopy Award, an honor bestowed for excellent and mission
important work. And yes, it's shaped like Snoopy wearing a space suit. Though Aldrich has been doing this since he was a teen, his is not some cushy seniority post. He has to qualify for the panel every four months. To do that, NASA puts Aldrich and the other volunteers through what's known as a ten bottle test. They have to identify seven smells and then point out the three bottles that have no smell. Aldrich told us, as we age,
eyesight is not always the first thing to go. The day I go up there and can't pass that ten bottle test is the day they're going to retire me from the Odor panel. The seven smells in the test are what are often known as primary smells. Aldrich rattled them off for us much more smoothly than I'm going to be able to musky minty, floral etherist, camp voracious, pungent, and putred. Aldrich does not, it should be pointed out, to have a particularly prominent nose, a size he noted
don't matter. He's generally unbothered by allergies, which he credits with helping his sense of smell, but he also constantly tests himself, often following a smell through a hallway to try to white deify it and its source. Harper said, from my perspective, I also feel that he has developed his sense of smell, much like a weightlifter develops his muscles or a wine taster develops a sense of taste. He does smell so many materials, and he focuses on
what those smells are like. I feel like he's been working that like a muscle, and it's become more sensitive over time. Aldrich was a member of the NASI fire department at White Sands. When his boss told him about the Odor Panel, he told us, I had no idea. I just thought I was doing something great for the astronauts. Since then, the Materials group has kept him busy, constantly giving him and the other members of the Odor Panel all sorts of materials to work with, including some truly
awful bits. He recalls the odor given off by undoing a velcro strap as being particularly nasty. You'll get no complaints from Aldrich, though, for a near half century he's been proud to stick his nose in wherever he can, all in the name of science. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio.
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