Nasa astronaut Butch Wilmore reported a “strange noise” from the afflicted Boeing Starliner space capsule whose problems kept him and colleague Suni Williams stuck in orbit six months longer than they expected when they blasted away from Earth in June.
Wilmore radioed mission control in Houston on Saturday to report a pulsating sound from a speaker inside the capsule. “I have a question about Starliner,” Wilmore said. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker… I don’t know what it’s doing.”
It has launched a search for what’s causing the noise in the spacecraft, which has been plagued by helium leaks and propulsion issues and will now return on autopilot to a landing site in New Mexico on September 6, without Wilmore and Williams. Nasa decided it was too risky for astronauts to fly into.
The pair are now scheduled to return to Earth in a capsule built by rival Boeing Space X, in February. To get to grips with Wilmore and Williams, two Nasa astronauts who will 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 located. Wilmore asked Houston flight controllers to see if they could listen, but eventually Wilmore, who appeared to be hovering in Starliner, had to put his microphone to the speaker.
“Okay, Butch, that one got through,” Mission Control radioed to Wilmore. “It was kind of a pulsing sound, almost like a sonar ping.” Wilmore texted back: “I’ll have you all rack your brains 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 report by Ars Technica. According to the outlet, sound oddities in spacecraft are not uncommon. In 2003, Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei said he heard what sounded like an iron bucket being hit by a wooden mallet.
