NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore reported a “strange noise” coming from the Boeing Starliner space capsule, whose problems left him and his colleague Suni Williams stuck in orbit six months longer than they had anticipated when they took off from on Earth in June.
Astronauts stuck in orbit recorded the bizarre sounds PHOTO Archive
Wilmore contacted mission control in Houston on Saturday to report a sound from a speaker inside the capsule. “I have a question about the Starliner,” Wilmore said. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker… I don’t know what’s causing it”according to The Guardian.
That sparked a search to identify the cause of the noise in the spacecraft, which had problems with helium leaks and propulsion problems and is now set to return on autopilot to a landing site in New Mexico without Wilmore and Williams on September 6, after NASA decided it was too risky for astronauts to fly it.
The two are now scheduled to return to Earth in a capsule built by Boeing competitor SpaceX in February. To bring Wilmore and Williams back, two NASA astronauts who were due to join the International Space Station will be left behind on a mission scheduled for later this month.
The source of the noise from the Boeing spacecraft is believed to come from a speaker feedback loop between the space station and Starliner.
But during the audio search, Wilmore asked air traffic controllers in Houston to listen, but eventually Wilmore, apparently floating in the Starliner, had to move his microphone closer to the speaker.
“Okay Butch, this one’s been received”handed mission control to Wilmore. “It was like a pulsating noise, almost like a sonar ping.” Wilmore answered by radio: “I’ll let you scratch your heads and try to figure out what’s going on… Call us if you figure it out.”
The strange noise was captured and shared by a Michigan meteorologist named Rob Dale and was first reported by Ars Technica. According to the publication, audio oddities in spacecraft are not uncommon. In 2003, Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei said he heard what sounded like a wooden hammer hitting an iron bucket.
