A creepy, sonar-like sound coming through Starliner’s speaker posed a brief mystery on the ISS

Starliner is scheduled to undock from the World Condominium Residing and fabricate its return day out to Earth uncrewed in barely a topic of days, but it indubitably it sounds as if silent has a couple of contemporary mysteries left in it to throw at the crew sooner than it departs. On Saturday, astronaut Butch Wilmore alerted NASA’s Mission Adjust about an unexplained “abnormal noise” coming from a speaker in the spacecraft, which you most most likely can hear in an audio clip of the conversation shared on a NASASpaceflight forum by meteorologist Rob Dale (noticed by Ars Technica). It starts at spherical the forty five-2nd label, ringing out on a normal beat. “I don’t know what’s making it,” Wilmore stated.

NASA has since stated that the sound has stopped in a dispute to SpaceNews’ Jeff Foust on Monday, and attributed it to an audio configuration between the ISS and Starliner. It used to be lawful speaker solutions, according to the home agency.

The noise used to be a chunk of a head-scratcher over the weekend. After confirming with Mission Adjust on Saturday that they would possibly well well hear the sound too, once Wilmore brought his mic over to the speaker, the flight controller in Houston stated, “It used to be more or less admire a pulsing noise, nearly admire a sonar ping.” Wilmore then let it play for about 20 seconds more sooner than wrapping up the name. “Proper to be sure that I’m on the equal web page, here is emanating from the speaker in Starliner,” Mission Adjust requested, “you don’t sight the rest, any other noises, any abnormal configs in there?” The astronaut noted at the time that all the pieces else gave the impression regular.

“The home salvage 22 situation audio machine is complicated, allowing a couple of spacecraft and modules to be interconnected, and it is overall to expertise noise and solutions,” NASA stated in its explanation to Foust on Monday. “The crew is requested to contact mission control after they hear sounds originating in the comm machine.” The incident had no affect to the crew or Starliner’s departure schedule, it added.

The Boeing spacecraft has been docked with the ISS since early June, and engineers beget since had their fingers full seeking to get to the bottom of the concerns that arose for the length of its first crewed flight. When Starliner indirectly heads support to Earth on September 6, it’ll be leaving its crew — Wilmore and NASA astronaut Suni Williams — in the support of on the ISS, the build aside they’ll continue to work for the subsequent few months while they wait for a gallop home from SpaceX in February 2025.

Update, September 2 2024, 2:30PM ET: This yarn has been updated to consist of a dispute and explanation from NASA.