The Argentine journalist Manuel Mazzanti who has been working in Cape Canaveral, covering each of the missions that take off from Earth from the American platform, shared an unusual event on their social networks. During an operation, both those who were outside a Space Station, as well as those who were inside it and on the earth base, maintained various communications, but in an instant a radio taxi call was filtered with clear references to streets in the Buenos Aires suburbs.
In full spacewalk on the International Space Stationthe astronauts and those who were in full labor managed to hear: “1-5-0 from Irigoyen, did you say?”. The audio coming from the earth’s surface was part of a conversation, with a marked Argentine accent, between a radio operator and a taxi driver to tell the driver the address of the passenger who had to go find them.
However, the stunned operators of the POT At first they believed that it was part of a dialogue between those who were in outer space. From the transmission control they alerted “open microphone”, thinking that the astronauts Sergey Prokopyev either Dmitry Petelin, which have an active microphone had been responsible for the audio. As a result of this fact, the passage of the International Space Station over Argentine territory was confirmed at the time recorded in the transmission. On the other hand, the point indicated in the communication is the street Bernardo de Irigoyen 150, from Villa Martelli, in the province of Buenos Aires.
Martin Salibe, responsible of Transfer and Technological Linkage of the Argentine Institute of Radio Astronomy – CONICET, explains the strange phenomenon: “This interference occurred, as I understand it, on the spacewalk of the astronauts. The frequency that the astronauts use for communication, between the inhabitants of the space station and those who are outside doing the walk, are the VHF and UHF bands”.
“But in this case, they are not frequencies that are running through the Doppler, given the two are stationary with respect to each other. Now the communications seen from the Spacial station, that come from Earth, if it changes in frequency and they run in frequency due to the speed of the Station itself. It is possible that a segment of some communication passes through that frequency that they are using”, details Salibe, hinting at what happened at that precise moment. “This phenomenon is very unlikely, because many technical conditions have to be met. But it can happen again”, concludes the Argentine specialist in radio astronomy.
The Doppler phenomenon, called “Doppler shift” It is established when the communication objects move at high speeds. The Space station moves at 27,000 km per hour, there is an effect on the communication frequency of approximately +3.2kHz, when it approaches and -3.2KHz when it moves away, therefore, there can only be a small segment of any random communication that interferes, such as that of the radio taxi, which is a fixed communication that occurs on the earth’s surface where there is little Doppler effect, although in very few probable but possible cases.
by RN
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