NASA's Butch Wilmore had Mission Control scratching its head this weekend with a question about an odd noise. "I've got a question about Starliner," Wilmore said in his Saturday message to Houston from the Boeing aircraft docked at the International Space Station, per the Guardian. "There's a strange noise coming through the speaker. I don't know what's making it." Wilmore "then [held] a device to the speakers, allowing Mission Control to hear the pulsating sound occurring at regular intervals," notes Space.com.
Johnson Space Center's Mission Control has since described it as a "pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping." You can hear the sound yourself in this X post by former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who wrote, "There are several noises I'd prefer not to hear inside my spaceship, including this one that @Boeing Starliner is now making." Wilmore and colleague Suni Williams are currently stranded on the ISS after it was determined the Starliner spacecraft may not be able to bring them back to Earth safely. Instead, they'll return in February on a SpaceX Dragon capsule headed toward the space station later this month.
Ars Technica, which first reported on the "space oddity," notes that astronauts report such noises on occasion, including during a 2003 spaceflight when China's Yang Liwei said he was hearing what sounded like an iron bucket being pummeled by a wooden hammer (turned out the noise had something to do with tiny deformations that affected the spacecraft's pressure). In this case, NASA believes it has solved the mystery. "The feedback from the speaker was the result of an audio configuration between the space station and Starliner," the agency said in a statement, per Space.com. "The speaker feedback Wilmore reported has no technical impact to the crew, Starliner, or station operations." (More Starliner stories.)
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