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Days before the troubled Boeing Starliner is scheduled to fly to Earth, a noise was reported aboard the capsule.
“I’ve got a question about Starliner,” astronaut Butch Wilmore said Saturday as he hailed Mission Control, according to ArsTechnica.
“There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it,” he said.
Wilmer wanted the Houston experts to hear what he was hearing, wondering at one point if it was an anomaly in the connection between the space station and the Starliner.
According to a recording of what came next, a distinctive, audible pinging sound came when he put his microphone up to the connection from Starliner.
“Alright Butch, that one came through,” Mission Control said. “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 said.
After another round of pings, Wilmore ended the conversation.
“Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out,” he said.
As of Monday, no explanation had bene given for the noise.
On Friday, the Starliner is scheduled to depart the space station. It will not carry Wilmore and Suni Williams.
Instead, NASA will bring Starliner home on autopilot, with ground crews on Earth at the controls.
Although Wilmore and Williams rode the craft to the space station in June in what was supposed to be a short mission, they have remained on the space station due to concerns with the Starliner’s safety.
Safety concerns led to the decision to send the Starliner back this week without its crew, while the astronauts are currently scheduled to return to Earth in February.
Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said talks between NASA and Boeing over putting the astronauts on the Starliner for their return “came down to a little disagreement about risk,” according to the New York Post.
