The saga of the misadventures of Boeing’s Starliner in space is far from over, even as the spacecraft is scheduled to return soon to Earth without its crew.
This time, NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some ‘strange noises’ coming from a speaker inside it.
Ars Technica reported:
“‘I’ve got a question about Starliner’, Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. ‘There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it’.”
Butch was not sure whether there was some problem in the connection between the station and the spacecraft that was causing the noise.
He asked Houston to listen to the audio inside the spacecraft.
“Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. ‘Alright Butch, that one came through’, Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. ‘It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping’.
‘I’ll do it one more time, and I’ll let y’all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on’, Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. ‘Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out’.”
The sonar-like noises most likely have a benign cause, and Butch did not seem worried.
Geeksided reported:
“The noise coming from the craft’s speaker sounds a lot like submarine sonar or like someone is knocking on the craft from the outside. However, the astronauts cannot hear it from anywhere but the speaker. You can hear the call to Houston that included the actual studio of the sound on the social media platform X. Maybe you will know what it is.”
Other possibility are geomagnetic pulses being the potential cause of the noises.
“Radiofrequency interference (RFI) or electromagnetic interference (EMI) from other systems onboard the ISS or the spacecraft itself could cause unintended noises through the speaker.”
Listen to Starliner’s strange noises on X.
This comes as as the Starliner is scheduled to fly home on Sept. 6.
The date is more than 12 weeks from the initial return date and will be performed without the crew.
NPR reported:
“In a statement, NASA said Starliner will undock from the International Space Station around 6 p.m. ET ‘pending weather and operational readiness’. The troubled spacecraft is expected to touch down shortly after midnight on a landing zone in New Mexico before it returns to Boeing’s Starliner factory at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The Starliner will leave behind astronauts Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Sunita ‘Suni’ Williams, who flew abroad Starliner back in June. The pair is slated to return in a capsule built by a competing company, Space X, in February.”
Read more:
NASA Pushes Return of Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore Back to Earth to 2025 in a SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule, as Boeing’s Starliner’s Woes Are Ongoing
The post Boeing’s Starliner Is Making Mysterious ‘Sonar’ Noises and No One Can Explain It – Plagued Spacecraft Is Scheduled To Return to Earth in a Week Without Its Crew appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.