NASA figures out how to smell Uranus (and other planets)

http://www.geek.com/science/nasa-figures-out-how-to-smell-uranus-and-other-planets-1596737/

What do aliens smell like? Both George Lucas and Douglas Adams have theorized that they might have bad B.O. (especially on the inside!) but the reality is that an alien moon, planet, or species could smell like just about anything. Statistically speaking, it’s almost certain that somewhere out there is a planet that smells like rotten eggs, and another that smells like freshly cooked bread; one might smell like lung-destroying acid, and another like a big wet dog. But knowing that such scents are out there is a far cry from knowing where they are, or what creates the smell. Now, NASA has a solution to this “problem.”

Basically, NASA has started doing for smell what food manufacturers have spend centuries doing for taste: replication. Rather than directly smelling the atmosphere for a distant world, this NASA team looked at a fairly standard array of spectroscopic tests performed via the Cassini probe, and the resulting data show the chemical composition of a target’s atmosphere. In this case, the team took detailed readings of the atmosphere on Saturn’s moon Titan, which is thick, brownish, and hazy.

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