What Do You Think a Comet Smells Like?
Anita Heward (Europlanet/University of Kent, UK) and Thibaut Roger (University of Bern, Switzerland) report on reactions to an unusual scent at the Swiss Comic Con.
Read article in the fully formatted PDF of the Europlanet Magazine.
Fantasy Basel, the Swiss Comic Con, is an annual convention on pop culture that attracted 88,000 visitors in 2024. From science-fiction (sci-fi) to street art and from fantasy to Virtual Reality, the event welcomes fans, cosplay enthusiasts and creative makers of all ages.
In recent years, the Space and Sci-Fi Hall has included an exhibition and hands-on activities led by
the Swiss Space Museum and its partners, including the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS. In 2023, Europlanet also joined with a stand and this year we were there again to support our Swiss colleagues by asking visitors an important question: ‘What do you think a comet smells like?’
The Aroma Company is a small, UK-based business that works with some of the world’s biggest brands on scents to incorporate into marketing campaigns. It was first approached in 2016 to develop a scent based on detections by the Rosetta mission of the composition of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The scent was impregnated into postcards that were distributed at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition on the stand ‘A Comet Revealed’, which was put together by UK partners in the Rosetta mission. Over the past eight years, these ‘smelly postcards’ have been reprinted and used by many organisations – including Europlanet – and have become a bit of a legend.
For Fantasy Basel, the University of Bern and the NCCR PlanetS decided decided to recommission the Aroma Company to create bottles of the comet scent, which could be shared with the public through a bespoke pull-up ‘sniff-tester’.
The actual composition of the comet, measured by the Swiss-led Rosina instrument on Rosetta, was mostly water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, with smelly compounds like hydrogen sulphide, ammonia, formaldehyde, methanol and sulphur dioxide. However pinning down exactly what the scent produced by the Aroma Company reminded people of proved a challenge, with visitors split between thinking it smelled nice or terrible and descriptions ranging from honey to horse manure.
Over the three days, we collected 328 creative reactions to the comet perfume on Post-It notes, and talked to up to 12,000 attendees on the stand overall. The word-cloud summarises the most popular answers. If you want to find out for yourself what a comet smells like, come to the Europlanet stand at EPSC2024 in Berlin!
