Saturday NASA Astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed a strange noise coming from the speakers aboard the Starliner spacecraft.
“We have a question about Starliner,” Wilmore radioed to Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “We’re hearing a strange noise coming from the speakers… we don’t know what it’s causing.”
Wilmore said he didn’t know if the noise was due to some anomaly in the spacecraft’s connection to the space station or something else. He asked flight controllers in Houston to see if they could listen in on the spacecraft. A few minutes later, mission control radioed back that they had a “hardline” connection to listen in on the Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months.
Apparently floating aboard the Starliner, Wilmore placed his microphone over a speaker on the Starliner. Moments later, a very distinctive sound was heard. “Butch, we got through,” Mission Control radioed Wilmore. “It sounded like a sonar ping, like a pulsating sound.”
Listen to the recording of what Butch Wilmore heard.
“I’ll try that again, guys, let’s all scratch our heads and see if we can figure out what’s going on,” Wilmore replied. The strange sonar-like noise was heard again. “Okay, your turn. Call me when you figure it out.”
Space Oddity
The audio, along with a recording of Wilmore’s conversation with Mission Control, was captured and shared by Michigan-based meteorologist Rob Dale.
The source of this strange, somewhat eerie sound wasn’t immediately clear. During the Starliner’s flight to the space station, it maintains communication with the station via a radio frequency system, but once docked, there is a hardline umbilical cable that transmits audio.
Astronauts sometimes notice such strange phenomena in space. For example, during China’s first manned space flight in 2003, astronaut Yang Liwei said he heard a sound like a wooden hammer hitting an iron bucket in orbit. Scientists later realized that the sound was caused by small deformations caused by the pressure difference between the inner and outer walls of the spacecraft.
The sonar-like sounds this weekend were likely caused by something innocent, and Wilmore was notably not exhausted. But the strange sounds are notable given the difficulties Boeing and NASA faced with Starliner’s first crewed flight, including a massive helium leak during flight and a thruster failure. NASA announced a week ago that Starliner would return without its original crew, Wilmore and Suni Williams, due to uncertainty about its viability.
Starliner is scheduled to return autonomously to Earth on Friday, September 6. Wilmore and Williams are scheduled to return to Earth in February next year aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch later this month with just the two astronauts on board.
This story originally Ars Technica.
