What does space smell like? This perfume-making astrobiologist is trying to find out

After a long career to create creator perfumes, Marina Barcenilla decided to turn her nose towards the cosmos.

The perfume designer signed up at the University in 2015 to study the planetary sciences. She took lessons in astrrochemistry – the chemical composition of space – when she realized that she could marry her two passions.

“Whenever I see something new, the first question is: I wonder what it smells of,” she said In this case Nile Köksal host.

“One day, I thought: in fact, this molecule that I study? I have it in my perfume laboratory. And that smell that I imagine? I could really create it.”

Barcenilla is now a doctoral researcher in astrrobiology at the University of Westminster in London, England. When she does not explore the feasibility of life on Mars, she recreated the smells of space, of the sulfuric sulfuror of the deepest clouds of Jupiter, with pungent punch like alcohol in the center of the Milky Way.

Four of these stellar perfumes are now available for public sniffing at the London Natural History Museum, as part of the current exhibition: Space: Could life exist beyond the earth?

“Antiseptic”, but also like cannon powder?

So what does space look like?

“I don’t think it feels very good in general,” said Barcenilla.

Those who can testify. Canadian astronaut Julie Payette, back from the international space station, told CBC News in 2009 This space smells “cold” and “antiseptic”.

“I opened the hatch six hours after the walk in space. All this SAS area was exposed to the space of space for all these hours. So, when I opened the door, I felt what was a kind of antiseptic smell,” she said.

“It was not a detergent, but it was really like a type of hospital smoke and I said to myself:” Wow is the smell of space. “The more I thought about it, I thought:” Wow, that’s what nothing feels, because there is probably nothing from there, not a single microbe or anything. “”

Canadian astronaut Chris Hatfield, on the other hand, described him differently, noting in 2013 that he and many others on board the station reported a smell of “burned steak and barrel powder” in the airlock.

“Not exactly a spring garden,” He said in a video of the Canadian space agency.

Barcenilla says that, regarding the smells of space, it really depends on what, in particular, you mean.

“Most of the space is quite empty and … it will not really feel,” she said. “But it is when you arrive at specific planets or moons, or when you go to a molecular cloud where we find high concentrations of different gas and microscopic dust, which we can then find molecules and chemical compounds which have a smell.”

Barcenilla says that she has created 25 smells since she started doing this job in 2017.

For the museum exhibition, she whipped the smell of Mars, which is her scientific specialty; Titan, a large orbitant moon from the Planet Saturn; Bennu, an asteroid; And the earth as there are about 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, while life was just starting.

“The early earth is a little smelly. It is a combination of a little terrible wet smell, like what you get when it rains, but also with the smell you get from various microbial strains,” she said.

“One of the smells you get is a kind of sulfes cabbage smell that also goes there. So it’s a bit stinking.”

She admits that none of her creations can be checked in itself.

“In space, you cannot feel so it will always be impossible. We have no air that we can breathe, so it’s completely out of the question,” she said. “But what I try to do is recreate the chemistry that we find in various places in space.”

“The more it stinks, the more people like to feel it”

Barcenilla brought her smells of space to schools to teach children, and she also had the chance to watch people interact with them at the museum.

“I always thought people were going to be a little afraid of smelly stuff, but no, they are the best,” she said. “The more it stinks, the more people like to feel it, the more they laugh and the more questions on this subject.”

The trigger for this curiosity, she says, is all the point.

“It is a question of bringing the space closer to the earth, and it is for people to open their minds and to understand that everything we have in space also found itself here on earth,” she said.

As a stranger as the final border may seem, Barcenilla says that there is nothing that is really unknown, at least from an olfactory point of view.

The interior clouds of Jupiter? Barcenilla tells BBC News They are full of ammonia and sulfur, something you could find in the fertilizer and that smells of rotten eggs.

The very center of our galaxy? You will find an ethyl formal form, a compound commonly found in the fruits, and which probably feels, at best, like rumAnd at worst, as the nail polish is the dissolving.

“We are part of the whole big cosmos,” said Barcenilla. “There is this saying that goes around that we are all star dust, and it is true. Everything we are made of, everything we feel here on earth, came from space.”