If the idea of being on the far side of the moon and hearing eerie “music” scares you, look away now.
That time we found a signal from space that ~might have been~ aliens.
It was August 1977 and astronomer Jerry Ehman was looking through computer readouts from a telescope tasked with searching for possible alien signals when something rare happened: He actually found something.
The Big Ear telescope, based at Ohio State University, had been pointing at a star called Chi Sagittarii as part of an experiment to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
Ehman was volunteering with the SETI programme at the time, and one evening he was poring over the printouts when saw a string of numbers and letters: "6EQUJ5".
To this day that sequence is considered by many to be the best candidate for an extraterrestrial signal we've ever seen.
Named the "Wow! signal" after what Ehman wrote on the printout, it was a burst of narrowband radio waves at a frequency of 1,420 megahertz. For the most part, natural sources, like galaxies and stars, are what's called "wideband" radio sources. "Narrowband" sources, like the signal Ehman had found, tend to be human made.
In the years since, people have tried to explain it in various ways. In fact, last year, astronomer Antonio Paris of St Petersburg College, Florida, did come up with a more run-of-the-mill explanation. He found two comets, called 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs and not discovered until years later, that would have been in the observing area on the night the Wow! signal was recorded. Comets tend to release a lot of hydrogen, and 1,420 megahertz is one of the main frequencies with which atoms of hydrogen absorb and emit energy. But the jury is still out on whether this explanation fits.
That time Apollo astronauts heard weird, "outer-space-type music" on the far side of the moon.
In 1969, three Apollo 10 astronauts were orbiting the moon, two in a lunar module just miles above the surface, and one in the command module higher up, when they heard something unusual. Their conversation, as preserved in NASA's archives, went like this:
"That music even sounds outer-spacey, doesn't it? You hear that? That whistling sound?" said Eugene Cernan, the lunar module pilot.
"Yes," said Thomas Stafford, mission commander.
"Whoooooo. Say your..." began Cernan.
"Did you hear that whistling sound, too?" asked John Young, command module pilot.
"Yes. Sounds like – you know, outer-space-type music," said Cernan.
Later on, Cernan brought it up again: "That eerie music is what's bothering me. You know that..."
"Goddamn, I heard it, too," said Young.
"You know, that was funny," said Cernan. "That's just like something from outer space, really. Who's going to believe it?"
"Nobody," said Young. "Shall we tell them about it?"
"I don't know," replied Cernan. "We ought to think about it some."
You can actually listen to the conversations for yourself and read the whole transcript if you want to at NASA's archive.
The Apollo 10 astronauts never talked about what they heard publicly when they came back to Earth. And last year, the Science Channel included the eerie music in a show called NASA's Unexplained Files.
But it seems there's a rather mundane explanation for the sound. Apollo 10 was the last moon mission before the big one, Apollo 11, later that year saw Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon, with Michael Collins in orbit in the command module.
NASA
Collins wrote in his book Carrying the Fire that NASA technicians warned him he might hear a strange whistling sound while the lunar module (LM) was on its way to the surface of the moon, and that if they hadn't it might have "scared the hell" out of him:
It was interference between the LM's and command module's VHF radios. We had heard it yesterday when we turned our VHF radios on after separating our two vehicles, and Neil said that it "sounds like wind whipping around the trees." It stopped as soon as the LM got on the ground, and started up again just a short time ago. A strange noise in a strange place.
That time two cosmonauts landed in the mountains in Siberia and had to survive freezing temperatures for two nights.
In 1965 cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was the first person to ever complete a spacewalk. The trip outside the spacecraft went pretty much as planned, but when he tried to re-enter, things started to go pear-shaped.
Forty years after the spaceflight he told the full story in an extract of his book, Two Sides of the Moon, published in Air & Space magazine.
When it was time to come back inside, Leonov realised his spacesuit had deformed with the lack of atmospheric pressure and he was going to have to go in head first rather than feet first, as had been planned. He was also going to have to slowly let all the oxygen out of his suit in order to actually fit into the airlock. It was uncomfortable – he said "I could feel my temperature rising dangerously high, with a rush of heat from my feet travelling up my legs and arms" – but he made it.
But his troubles didn't end there. Just before Leonov and his crewmate, Pavel Belyayev, were due to start coming out of orbit and back to Earth, they realised their landing module's automatic guidance system wasn't working. They had to get back to Earth manually, and they had to choose where to land.
Wanting somewhere sparsely populated but still within Soviet territory, they headed for an area west of the Ural mountains. But as soon as Belyayev turned on the engines they noticed something was up. A communication cable still connected the landing module, where the two cosmonauts were, to the orbit module, and they were spinning around it as it threw them off course.
Eventually it burned through, and the landing module came free – but the mishap meant they were 2,000km away from their planned landing spot. They were also in 2 feet of snow, without any shelter except their landing capsule, and with only one pistol to protect themselves against the area's wildlife.
NASA / USSR Academy of Sciences
from BuzzFeed - Kelly Oakes http://ift.tt/2tyQwld
