• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Space Station 'Crunch' Sound Is Still a Mystery, NASA Says in Houston

Posted on: Sunday, 30 November 2003, 06:00 CST

Nov. 30--The source of an unusual crunching sound heard by the crew of the international space station earlier this week remains unexplained, but it does not appear to have come from an impact with space debris, a NASA spokesman said Friday.

The brief sound early Wednesday outside the station was described by American Mike Foale, the station's commander, and Russian Alexander Kaleri, the flight engineer, as resembling an aluminum can being crunched or the sudden flexing of a thin sheet of the metal.

Checks by NASA with the Department of Defense, which tracks thousands of small manmade objects in orbital space with radar, including satellites and debris from old rockets, did not reveal anything on a collision course with the 240-mile high orbital base, space agency spokesman James Hartsfield said Friday.

"There is not a lot left to analyze. Everything is working fine on board. Our best (external) camera surveys showed nothing out of the ordinary," said Hartsfield. "We did check with the (Pentagon), and they did not report anything tracking in the vicinity of the space station at the time."

After taking much of Thanksgiving Day off, Foale and Kaleri resumed research and maintenance activities on Friday.

But the topic of the unusual noise, which was heard outside the Russian crew dormitory module and lasted about one second, came up a couple of times in discussions with ground-based experts at Mission Control in Houston and outside Moscow.

Yuri Malenchenko, the station's previous commander, told Foale and Kaleri of hearing similar noises while he and American Ed Lu lived and worked aboard the outpost. Their 185-day mission came to an end in late October.

Malenchenko is in Houston at NASA's Johnson Space Center for a mission debriefing session.

"That sound was somewhat odd, unusual for that location. We never heard it before," Foale said (Friday) in a brief exchange with Russia's Mission Control. "I don't think it was anything. It was a sound, but nothing happened after that. I think everything is OK."

-----

To see more of the Houston Chronicle, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.HoustonChronicle.com

(c) 2003, Houston Chronicle. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

More News in this Category