“150 Irigoyen, you mentioned?” The harmless query made by an obvious taxi driver has change into a sensation in Argentina after the motive force’s taxi radio interfered with the sign from the Worldwide Area Station and popped up reside throughout NASA’s reside broadcast of a spacewalk.
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin labored in a single day on Tuesday to move a radiator from the ISS’ Rassvet module to the Nauka science module, spending a complete of seven hours and 55 minutes outdoors the area station. Throughout their spacewalk, the ISS handed over Argentina a number of instances. It was 12:30 a.m. ET when issues began to get bizarre.
At the moment, reporter Manuel Mazzanti was watching NASA’s reside broadcast of the spacewalk on the company’s official channel when he instantly heard a voice with an Argentinian accent. It gave the impression to be a taxi driver on his radio confirming whether or not he had understood an handle appropriately: Irigoyen (or maybe Yrigoyen) 150.
The interference was loud and clear, however solely lasted three seconds. The NASA TV presenter reacted rapidly and apologized for the blip, saying it was a “sizzling mic.” You possibly can see the second this occurred in a clip Mazzanti posted on Twitter.
There are nonetheless many unanswered questions on this humorous incident. First, the place did the sign come from? The taxi driver, supply employee, or messenger concerned hasn’t launched any data to the general public, so we will solely speculate.
As for the place precisely the handle in query is in Argentina, that’s difficult. It could possibly be Bernardo de Irigoyen or Hipólito Yrigoyen, and there are dozens of avenues, boulevards, and streets with these names in Argentina. For instance, I’m an Argentinian expat, and I lived at Bernardo de Irigoyen 476 for almost all of my childhood.
There’s additionally an avenue known as Hipólito Yrigoyen in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, so we will’t rule out that the taxi driver was Uruguayan and never Argentinian. However given the placement of the ISS for the time being of the incident, it’s extra probably that the sign got here from the province of Buenos Aires in Argentina.
Twitter has, as typical, introduced varied theories. Some say handle refers to a bakery at Avenida Hipólito Yrigoyen 150 in Moron, a metropolis in Buenos Aires province, though I think about it could have been closed at 1:30 a.m. native time. Different mentioned the handle referred to a house located at Irigoyen 150 in Villa Martelli. Total, it’s unattainable to determine it out with such few clues.
The second query is: What occurred? It seems that someway, a neighborhood radio sign interfered with the ISS’ VHF or UHF sign. It’s attainable that the taxi driver was utilizing a frequency assigned to NASA or Roscosmos, which is likely to be why their analog sign ended up the place it shouldn’t have. Once more, I’m solely speculating.
The ISS was flying 267 miles (430 kilometers) above Argentina in the course of the incident, which is rather a lot even by VHF requirements, however there aren’t many obstacles past the ambiance. It may have additionally been interfering with a station on Earth. Ultimately, the NASA presenter confused what occurred with an open mic, and the spacewalk continued enterprise as typical.
Gizmodo reached out to NASA for touch upon Thursday however didn’t obtain a response.
Argentinians, in the meantime, welcomed the incident with delight, declaring that they have been “the most effective nation on the earth” and singing the nation’s World Cup anthem. Others said that the incident was “merely Argentina, you wouldn’t perceive.”
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