Mondo Knows Facts
Moon dust smelled like spent gunpowder
Astronauts reported the odour inside the cabin after dust came back on their suits Lunar dust is fine, sharp and clingy, and it carries an odour astronauts compared to burnt cordite. The smell faded once the dust oxidised in the cabin air. Dust also scratched visors and clogged seals, one of the main engineering problems of the programme. It sits in Mondo's space collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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Tags: apollo, regolith, astronauts
Moon dust smelled like spent gunpowder: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Astronauts reported the odour inside the cabin after dust came back on their suits. The figure is taken from NASA Science, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a space fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Space shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.