On Saturday NASA Astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises coming from the speakers inside the Starliner spacecraft.
“I have a question about Starliner,” Wilmore called down to Mission Control, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “There’s a strange noise coming from the speakers… I don’t know what that noise is.”
Wilmore said he wasn’t sure if there was something unusual about the connection between the station and the spacecraft that was causing the noise or something else. He asked flight controllers in Houston if they could hear sounds inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control responded by radio that they were “hardwired” to hear sounds inside the Starliner, which has now been connected to the International Space Station for nearly three months.
Wilmore, who appeared to be floating on the Starliner, then raised his microphone to a speaker inside the Starliner. Immediately afterward, there was a rather distinctive audible ping. “Okay Butch, it’s coming through,” mission control radioed to Wilmore. “It’s like a pulse, almost like a sonar ping.”
Listen to a recording of the noises Butch Wilmore heard.
“I’m going to do it one more time, and I’m going to let you guys scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on,” Wilmore replied. The strange sonar-like noise then repeated. “Okay, your turn. Call us if you figure it out.”
A strangeness of space
This recording and Wilmore’s conversation with Mission Control, was captured and shared by a meteorologist named Rob Dale in Michigan.
It wasn’t immediately clear what was causing this strange and somewhat eerie noise. When the Starliner flew to the space station, it maintained contact with the station via a radio frequency system. However, once it was connected, there was a hardwired umbilical cord that transmitted the sound.
Astronauts occasionally notice such strange things in space. For example, during China’s first manned space flight in 2003, Astronaut Yang Liwei said He heard a sound like an iron bucket being hit by a wooden hammer while in orbit. Scientists later realized the noise was caused by small deformations in the spacecraft due to the pressure difference between the inner and outer walls.
The sonar-like noises this weekend likely have a benign cause, and Wilmore certainly didn’t seem fazed. But the strange noises are worth noting because of the challenges facing Boeing and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had with Starliner’s first crewed flight, including a significant helium leak during flight and a failure of the booster. NASA announced a week ago that, due to uncertainty about Starliner’s airworthiness, it would return home without its original crew of Wilmore and Suni Williams.
Starliner is now preparing to return to Earth autonomously. on Friday, September 6. Wilmore and Williams will return to Earth next February, flying aboard the a Crew Dragon spacecraft scheduled to launch with just two astronauts later this month.
This story originally appeared on Ars Engineering.
