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Space

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Asteroid Search

Students from the University of Khartoum scour the Nubian desert in Sudan for remnants of an asteroid, which in a first, was tracked from space to impact.

"It's the first time we've been able to track something through the air and watch it fly apart and then find pieces of it," microbial ecologist Rocco Mancinelli of SETI, a co-author of a study on the meteorite pieces Wednesday in Nature, told Wired.com.

Finding the meteorites was a long shot, but because the rocks would be so important, meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of SETI, lead author of the study, took a bus loaded with 45 students and staff from the University of Khartoum deep into the desert to hunt for them. A 10-hour bus ride and an 18-mile trek through the sand took them to the remote area where scientists thought the rocks, if they existed, would be. The group began sweeping the desert in a line and two hours later the first meteorite was found by a student.

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WHAT DOES SPACE SMELL LIKE?

For all my curiosity about cosmology and obsession with shows on the History and Discovery Channel about the Universe I realized that I've never considered the question of whether the outer space has a smell or odor.  Well, now I have some idea thanks to this NASA astronaut:

It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as "tastes like chicken." The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.

Mmm.  O' delicious metallic fumes.

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