Asked by a taxi driver, the rather innocent “Did you say 150 Irigoyen?” The question caused a sensation in Argentina when the taxi radio interfered with the signal from the International Space Station and NASA took the stage live during a live spacewalk broadcast.
Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin conducted a study Tuesday to move a radiator from the ISS’s Rassvet module to the Nauka science module, spending a total of seven hours and 55 minutes outside the space station. During the spacewalks, the ISS passed over Argentina several times. That’s when things started to get weird.
At the time, reporter Manuel Mazzanti was watching a live broadcast of the spacewalk on NASA’s official channel. And suddenly he heard a voice with an Argentinian accent. This voice belonged to a taxi driver trying to confirm whether he understood an address correctly.
The sound was loud and clear, but only lasted three seconds. The NASA TV presenter reacted quickly and apologized for this signal. Those moments can be watched in a video Mazzanti shared on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/manumazzanti/status/1648549659122515968
Of course, there are many unanswered questions about this event, and the first and perhaps the most curious of these questions is about where this signal came from. The taxi driver, delivery man or messenger involved did not reveal any information to the public, so their identity is unknown.
Where exactly the address in question is in Argentina is another curious question. It is possible that the address in question was Bernardo de Irigoyen or Hipólito Yrigoyen, and Argentina has dozens of streets, boulevards and streets with these names.
In Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, there is a street called Hipólito Yrigoyen. So it’s possible that the taxi driver is Uruguayan, not Argentinean. However, given the location of the ISS at the time of the incident, the signal seems most likely to come from Argentina’s Buenos Aires province.
The second important question is how is it possible for a local signal to interfere with the VHF or UHF signal of the ISS. It’s possible that the taxi driver is using a frequency assigned to NASA or Roscosmos, and the analog signals are left where they shouldn’t be due to a problem or misconfiguration.
The ISS was flying 430 kilometers above Argentina at the time of the incident, which is quite a distance even by VHF standards. But in between, there are not many obstacles other than the atmosphere.
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