“The perfume of 67P/C-G is quite strong, with the odor of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide), horse stable (ammonia), and the pungent, suffocating odor of formaldehyde. This is mixed with the faint, bitter, almond-like aroma of hydrogen cyanide,” Kathrin Altwegg, head of the ROSINA project at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern, described the smell. “Add some whiff of alcohol (methanol) to this mixture, paired with the vinegar-like aroma of sulfur dioxide and a hint of the sweet aromatic scent of carbon disulfide, and you arrive at the ‘perfume’ of our comet”.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
We are about to land on a smelly comet
“What’s surprising is we already have extremely rich chemistry at this distance from the sun,”
“The perfume of 67P/C-G is quite strong, with the odor of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide), horse stable (ammonia), and the pungent, suffocating odor of formaldehyde. This is mixed with the faint, bitter, almond-like aroma of hydrogen cyanide,” Kathrin Altwegg, head of the ROSINA project at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern, described the smell. “Add some whiff of alcohol (methanol) to this mixture, paired with the vinegar-like aroma of sulfur dioxide and a hint of the sweet aromatic scent of carbon disulfide, and you arrive at the ‘perfume’ of our comet”.
“The perfume of 67P/C-G is quite strong, with the odor of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide), horse stable (ammonia), and the pungent, suffocating odor of formaldehyde. This is mixed with the faint, bitter, almond-like aroma of hydrogen cyanide,” Kathrin Altwegg, head of the ROSINA project at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern, described the smell. “Add some whiff of alcohol (methanol) to this mixture, paired with the vinegar-like aroma of sulfur dioxide and a hint of the sweet aromatic scent of carbon disulfide, and you arrive at the ‘perfume’ of our comet”.
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4 comments:
yucky.
I managed to boggle my Sed-Strat prof by telling her there were dunes on a comet. I promised to send her a link with the pictures but a classmate with a smartphone found them in a couple of seconds.
Dunes on a comet.
This is really amazing stuff.
Gives new meaning to eau de toilette (toilet water).
As a distinction, this is what the comet smells like, not what space smells like. If you want to know what space smells like, it smells like the odor you get after mig or arc welding. That is the general odor of space that we know of and how do we know this, because this is what the astronauts told us after they came back from space walks and they could smell it on their space suits.
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