Chinese astronaut confused by 'Knocking Sound' in space
Imagine you are alone in a small spaceship - this is your first time there, alone in countless spaces. Then suddenly a knocking sound.
That's what happened to Yang Liwei, China's first human in space, on his maiden flight in 2003.
In a current interview, he now recalls hearing "someone physically knocking on a spaceship is like tapping an iron bucket with a wooden hammer".
"It didn't get here from outside nor from inside the spaceship."
Naturally, he felt a little anxious and peeked out the window but failed to find any rationalization for the terrifying knock.
He was now in no position to know what it was, neither in the area nor after returning to earth. He has even tried - but failed - to recreate the sound so the professionals might want to help him notice it.
Unsurprisingly, the story of an unexplained sound thriller at home has garnered little attention.
What - or who - ever knocked Mr Yang's spaceship because he was once within miles of earth safety?
Infinite silence?
Given that there is no medium for sound travel, the area is expected to be quiet.
"Sound travel visits require a medium - be it air particles or water molecules or metals, stable atoms," Prof Goh Cher Hiang, a professional in area engineering at the National University of Singapore, tells the BBC.
A simple example of this is thunder - sound coming through the air, underwater sonar, or a stable solid musical instrument.
"If it knocks, there may be something physically 'hitting' the spacecraft carrying the astronauts," he says - but stresses that such a recommendation is simply speculative.
His colleague Wee-Seng Soh brought a unique clarification to the table, suggesting it may want to be "the end result of the spacecraft's enlargement or contraction, especially given that the spacecraft's exterior temperature may wish to change drastically in orbit."
Mr Yang's days as an astronaut are long past, but according to Chinese media, the voice has also been heard by subsequent Chinese astronauts on the 2005 and 2008 missions.
In fact, the veteran instructed his successors about it so they wouldn't get caught up in defense and fear about it like he did.
So even though it can't be explained, he now puts it as a "normal phenomenon".
Space sound
In fact, it's not uncommon to hear voices in the house - and now it's not uncommon not to find a convincing explanation for the noise.
In 1969 saw the flight for a Moon landing mission orbiting the Moon, and on the aspect of temporarily reducing radio contact with Earth, the astronauts heard an unusual sound they couldn't explain.
The whistling sound was once described as a house song through them, but the statistics were never categorized until recently. The original recording of the sound was only published earlier this year.
NASA rationalization once said that it must be some kind of radio interference - as an alternative to, well, aliens.
Subsequent home missions also recorded comparable sound and NASA released footage of Juno's home orbiting Jupiter.
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