Planetary Body Odors

Planetary Body Odors
A smell emanating from a Norton County meteorite gives this author some idea how an asteroid would smell if it had an atmosphere.

This has to be one of my more unusual “Findings”!
This “finding” involves the smell of a meteorite, which I’m discovering is a very difficult subject to write about and explain. Certainly can’t rely on images to help explain how my meteorite smells.
But, if I am right, this “meteorite-smell” is what I believe an asteroid would smell like, if you were able to envelope the parent-body in an oxygen atmosphere.
The image above depicts one of my specimens of the Norton County (Aubrite), a fragmental impact-brecciated enstatite achondrite. This image also depicts the plastic bag which contained this meteorite specimen ever since it was first extracted from one of the large masses of Norton County by researchers at University of New Mexico (UNM).

All of the following images are of this same specimen.

“Click” the above image to ENLARGE!!

It is this specimen, as well as, other similar-looking samples that are contained in similar sample bags, that appear to be giving off a peculiar odor. These plastic sample bags seem to have preserved whatever is producing the smell emanating from the meteorite specimens. This odor has been accumulating in these plastice bags undisturbed for what I have been told is “many years”!

Although the geneology is still somewhat sketchy for this fragment, it is clear that this sample was bagged & tagged by UNM Institute of Meteoritics personnel immediately after it was extracted from a large mass of the Norton County meteorite. They labeled the bag with a “Norton County N.15969” catalog number, which can be found on-line on the UNM website for “Institute of Meteoritics (IOM) Meteorite Catalog – Specimen Query Results for NORTON COUNTY (Found 18 February 1948) Kansas, USA.

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The smell that is being given off by this meteorite is hard to describe. When I first smelt it, I tried to think of the proper words to describe the odor. I tried to think of things that had a similar smell:
like hot metal, or like a cast-iron skillet that has over-heated, or like the metal filaments when you first turn on an electric heater.
Also, a lot like when you make sparks by striking two flint-rocks against each other.
Maybe a little like ozone, but with a more smoky, sulfurous aroma.

That’s when the phrase “burnt gunpowder” came into my mind.

And that’s when I remembered reading that the Apollo astronauts reported that moondust had the strong smell of “spent gunpowder”. They would notice this after conducting EVA and after returning to the Lunar Lander where the moondust that clung to their space-suits had apparently reacted with the oxygen and moisture in the pressurized cabin to produce this odor. I say “apparently” because to this day NASA still does not have an adequate explanation for this phenomenon. But to this very day, astronauts and cosmonauts still remark about the ozone-like smell that lingers on their space-suits after returning from a space-walk outside the ISS.
In fact, an Iranian woman cosmonaut said that “space smells like a burnt almond cookie“!
(Probably each person would have their own, personal description of this odor.)
And NASA is actually trying to recreate this odor in order to train and prepare their future lunar astronauts for when they return to the Moon!

“Click” the above image to ENLARGE!!

Although NASA has yet to provide a proven explanation for how moondust generated this “burnt gunpowder” smell, they have proposed a couple interesting theories:
One explanation is that the Lunar Lander’s oxygen atmosphere literally “burns” the moondust. Because oxygen is very reactive it could actually chemically bond with the moondust. This process is nothing more than oxidation, and is the same thing as “burning”, but it happens too slowly for smoke or flames to be produced, yet the oxidation of moondust might produce an aroma like “burnt gunpowder”.

Another explanation involves how moondust is actually formed. When meteoroids hit the moon, they reduce rocks to jagged dust. This is a process of constant hammering and smashing (see image below).
Over time, molecular bonds in the moondust are broken, producing “dangling bonds” – which are unsatisfied electrical connections that need atomic partners. When astronauts inhaled moondust, what happened was those dangling bonds sought “partners” in the moist membranes of the nose. When this happened, the astronaut’s sense of smell would respond by registering this “chemical reaction” to the brain as being “a strange odor” .

Moondust is formed by pounding; the “hammers” are meteoroids.
Image credit: Prof. Larry Taylor, University of Tennessee.

What all of this has to do with why there is an odor emanating from my Norton County specimens is this:
I see a connection between – how the pulverizing of moonrock by meteoroids produces this odor in moondust – with the brecciation and production of impact melt in the parent body of the Norton County meteorite!
I found that this odor was only prevalent in the most brecciated specimens where dark-colored impact melt had infused with the light-colored breccia clasts of the enstatite achondrite.

What this means is that this odor (along with the brecciation) is an ancient record of the impact event that occurred on that planetary body.
This means that these meteorite specimens are also samples of the same odors from space that, up until now, only astronauts were able to smell.

This is all made possible because of:
the large size of the individual masses from the Norton County fall, as well as
the prompt recovery of these masses from this fall, and more importantly
the prompt placement of the brecciated specimens into plastic bags.
All of this served to protect this “odor” and to minimize its contact with atmospheric moisture and oxygen.

“Click” the above image to ENLARGE!!

I feel very fortunate to have had this opportunity to “smell space”!
I found it difficult, but I’ve tried to convey in words what it is that I am personally experiencing when I smell my specimens. But this experience would be unique for each person, and probably would be described differently and uniquely by each person.
Although this smell emanating from my Norton County specimens is the result of the brecciation of an enstatite achondrite, I doubt that the pulverized anorthosite on the moon has a much different smell. So, I feel that I now have something in common with the NASA astronauts and can better appreciate, if not their visual and aural, at least their nasal experiences while they were on the moon and while traveling thru space.

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