Nasa astronaut Butch Wilmore has reported a “strange noise” coming from the stricken Boeing Starliner space capsule whose problems have left him and colleague Suni Williams stuck in orbit for six months longer than they anticipated when they blasted off from earth in June.
Wilmore radioed mission control in Houston on Saturday to report a pulsing sound from a speaker inside the capsule. “I’ve got a question about Starliner,” Wilmore said. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it.”
That set off a hunt for what is causing the noise in the spacecraft that has been dogged with helium leaks and propulsion issues and is now set to return on autopilot to a landing point in New Mexico, without Wilmore and Williams, on 6 September after Nasa decided it was too risky for astronauts to fly in.
The pair are now slated to return to Earth in a capsule built by Boeing competitor Space X, in February. In order to get Wilmore and Williams down, two Nasa astronauts set to join the international space station will be left behind from a mission later this month.
The source of the pulsing noise coming from Boeing spacecraft has not yet been traced. Wilmore asked Houston flight controllers to see if they could listen but ultimately Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, had to put his microphone up to the speaker.
“Alright Butch, that one came through,” Mission control radioed Wilmore. “It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping.” Wilmore radioed back: “I’ll let y’all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on … Call us if you figure it out.”
The strange ping was captured and shared by a Michigan-based meteorologist named Rob Dale and was first reported by Ars Technica. According to the outlet, audio oddities in spacecraft are not unusual. In 2003, Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei said he heard what sounded like an iron bucket being struck by a wooden hammer.