The ‘stranded in space’ saga is still in full swing for NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams – with it being set to continue until 2025 – but things got a bit precarious over the last weekend.

Although the pair remain ‘confident’ that they will eventually make a safe return to Earth, they were probably a bit panicked when they suddenly started hearing ‘strange’ noises on Saturday (31 August).

Despite initially being stumped by the cause of the mysterious sounds, NASA have now confirmed exactly what they were. And although a ton of social media users had ‘space ghosts’ down as the prime suspects, they were sadly mistaken.

For those who don’t know, American test-pilots Wilmore, 61, and Williams, 58, set off for what was supposed to be a short trip up to the International Space Station (ISS) back on 5 June, and were set to return later the same month.

But technical issues have plagued the new Boeing Starliner capsule they were sent up into space on, with thruster failures and helium leaks forcing their return to Earth to be drastically delayed.

The duo need an alternative mode of transport to get them home, and it seems that cadging a lift on SpaceX Crew-9’s return flight in February 2025 is looking like the best bet.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, Steve Stich, said of the situation: “We have been working with SpaceX to ensure they are ready to respond with Crew-9 as a contingency.

“We have not formally committed to this path, but we wanted to ensure we had all that flexibility in place.”

The astronauts were left alarmed after hearing a strange sound over the weekend (Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP)

On Friday (6 September), the Starliner is set to undock from the ISS and make a solo journey back to Earth without anyone on board, while Wilmore and Williams will have to stay up there for at least another six months.

Talk about copping the sh*tty end of the stick, eh?

Well, things got even more worrying for the NASA astronauts on Saturday when Wilmore contacted Houston‘s Johnson Space Center to share his concerns after hearing a ‘strange noise coming through the speaker’.

Mission control confirmed that they could also hear a sound which was ‘kind of like a pulsating noise, almost like a sonar ping’ and that they would get back to the astronauts after investigating further.

Although Wilmore and Williams kept their cool, the rest of the world was sent into a frenzy of concern about the stranded pair – and even former astronauts, such as former Canadian spaceman Chris Hadfield, weren’t immune to it.

The former ISS commander wrote in a post on X: “There are several noises I’d prefer not to hear inside my spaceship, including this one that Starliner is now making.”

The Starliner is set to return to Earth solo this week (Paul Hennessy/Anadolu via Getty Images)

But thankfully, we can all now cool our jets as NASA revealed that the source of the bizarre sound has been identified.

In a statement, a NASA spokesperson explained: “A pulsing sound from a speaker in Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft heard by NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore aboard the International Space Station has stopped.

“The feedback from the speaker was the result of an audio configuration between the space station and Starliner.

“The space station audio system is complex, allowing multiple spacecraft and modules to be interconnected, and it is common to experience noise and feedback.

“The crew is asked to contact mission control when they hear sounds originating in the comm system. The speaker feedback Wilmore reported has no technical impact to the crew, Starliner, or station operations, including Starliner’s uncrewed undocking from the station no earlier than Friday, Sept. 6.”

Hang on – what’s that strange sound I hear now?

Ah, it must be the whole world breathing a huge sigh of relief that Wilmore and Williams live to fight another day.

When NASA landed a probe on an asteroid and took samples they brought back some incredibly valuable things to Earth.

The official name of this chunk of space rock is 101955 Bennu, which we’ll call ‘Bennu’ for short because the numbers seem rather superfluous in this conversation.

A spacecraft launched in 2016 was able to reach Bennu two years later and searched for a good landing spot on the chunk of space rock hurtling around our planet.

Between 20 October 2020 and 10 May 2021 the OSIRIS-REx craft was on the asteroid where it had successfully collected a sample to bring back to humanity.

On 24 September 2023, seven years and 16 days after it first launched, the spacecraft made it back to Earth with a sample from the asteroid, where scientists had a bit of a job actually opening up the capsule and it wasn’t fully cracked open until 14 January 2024.

Some of the samples collected from the asteroid (MARK FELIX/AFP /AFP via Getty Images)

According to Astronomy.com, what NASA found in their first analysis of the Bennu sample indicated that water had once flowed through the asteroid.

Subsequent research led by Sara Russell of the Natural History Museum in London found more information about this in the form of a lack of chondrules, little rounded grains of rock found in meteorites.

She said: “The aqueous alteration would have destroyed the chondrules it may have had.”

If you’re wondering what chondrules are, they’re small, microscopic rocks that are named after the Greek word for ‘grain’ and are thought to be part of the foundational building blocks of planets.

Bennu had been predicted to be rich in water but the discovery confirmed that, while the rocks recovered from the asteroid sample are unlike any others found before meaning that the mission to space recovered something truly unique.

The Bennu asteroid was first discovered in 1999 and the name came from the winning entry in a contest to name an asteroid, with a young child called Michael Puzio suggesting the winning name after the Ancient Egyptian mythological bird of the same name.

Studying the asteroid has shown that it is actually speeding up slightly as it spins around in space, as every 100 years the time it takes to complete a full rotation is reduced by one second.

Now we’ll have to see how it does without the chunk of rock we extracted from it, while we can content ourselves with the discovery that water once flowed through the asteroid and there are rocks from Bennu which look like nothing else we’ve ever seen.

NASA has revealed a major update after they’ve broken records in space.

According to the space agency, its spacecraft broke the record for being a human-made invention being the closest ever to the surface of the sun.

On 24 December, the Parker Solar Probe was able to come within 3.8 million miles of the sun’s surface at amazing speeds of 430,000 miles per hour, according to NASA.

The craft aimed to touch the Sun by flying through its weakest atmosphere, also known as the corona, which reaches temperatures of 982C.

The team at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland, US found out that the craft had broken the record for closest encounter to the ball of flames when it gave the all clear to the team on Christmas Eve, telling them that it had touched the Sun.

The Parker Solar Probe was able to come within 3.8 million miles of the sun’s surface (Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty Images)

It was so fast to do its job that the team didn’t even expect to hear from it until 27 December, making it three days early on its flight plan.

Nasa said: “Following its record-breaking closest approach to the sun, Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe has transmitted a beacon tone back to Earth indicating it’s in good health and operating normally.”

Thanks to the data it will have collected from the atmosphere, scientists hope that it will allow them more information on how material is heated to millions of degrees, what is going on with where solar wind comes from, and they hope to learn how energetic particles reach near light speeds once flung into space.

It had to pass Venus seven times in order to use the planet’s gravity to move it into a tighter orbit, which launched it to the Sun, where it passed 21 times and touched it on the 22^nd attempt.

“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” said Nick Pinkine, Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager at APL.

It touched the Sun (Bill Ingalls/NASA via Getty Images)

Pinkine added: “We’re excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the Sun.”

The mission hopes to ‘take measurements that help scientists better understand how material in this region gets heated to millions of degrees, trace the origin of the solar wind (a continuous flow of material escaping the Sun) and discover how energetic particles are accelerated to near light speed,’ states the website.

Dr Nicola Fox, Nasa’s head of science, told BBC News: “For centuries, people have studied the Sun, but you don’t experience the atmosphere of a place until you actually go (and) visit it.

“And so we can’t really experience the atmosphere of our star unless we fly through it.

“We are 93 million miles away from the Sun, so if I put the Sun and the Earth one metre apart, Parker Solar Probe is 4cm from the Sun – so that’s close.”

Dr Fox added: “I will worry about the spacecraft. But we really have designed it to withstand all of these brutal, brutal conditions. It’s a tough, tough little spacecraft.”

They’ll know more on 1 January once the probe delivers a comprehensive data report, which could help scientists understand the Sun more in-depth.

The answer as to whether life had ever existed on Mars could be given a huge boost this year thanks to massive explosions on the surface of the Sun.

At the centre of our solar system is the big fiery inferno that, every 11 years or so, enters into what NASA calls its ‘peak activity’.

Essentially, it becomes more violent with scolding hot outbursts in to space on a much more regular basis.

2024 is such a year for the Sun, with it set to be a massive period that could decide NASA’s plans to sent astronauts to Mars for the very first time.

But it’s so much more than that, with it hopefully providing the scientific basis to understand more about the potential of extraterrestrial life on Mars.

From the end of 2024, NASA is set to focus its efforts on studying these big explosions happening on the surface of Earth’s star. Or the Sun ‘throwing fiery tantrums’ as NASA officially describes it.

When it comes to sending astronauts to Mars, studying the solar events will be vital given Mars’ lack of a magnetic field.

On Earth, the magnetic field shields us from most solar outbursts that are thrown towards the planet, whereas Mars doesn’t have that luxury and thus the effects are felt pretty forcefully on its surface.

The plan here is to study exactly how astronauts would be impacted by the solar explosions and how they could be shielded if it is deemed safe enough to send them in the first place.

Explosions on surface of the Sun (HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

NASA’s MAVEN [Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution] and RAD [Radiation Assessment Detector] spacecraft will be positioned above the Martian surface where they will study how these solar storms impact what happens on the surface.

The RAD spacecraft will also be essential to ongoing attempts to confirm ancient life on Mars and if confirmed – specifically when it did and why it might have died out.

“You can have a million particles with low energy or 10 particles with extremely high energy,” said RAD’s principal investigator, Don Hassler of the Boulder, Colorado, office of the Southwest Research Institute.

“While MAVEN’s instruments are more sensitive to lower-energy ones, RAD is the only instrument capable of seeing the high-energy ones that make it through the atmosphere to the surface, where astronauts would be.”

The surface of Mars (NASA)

Data from RAD has and will continue to help scientists understand how radiation breaks down carbon-based molecules on the surface.

This process could be vital to understanding whether signs of ancient microbial life are preserved there.

Principal investigator for NASA’s MAVEN orbiter is Shannon Curry, of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

She said: “For humans and assets on the Martian surface, we don’t have a solid handle on what the effect is from radiation during solar activity.

“I’d actually love to see the ‘big one’ at Mars this year – a large event that we can study to understand solar radiation better before astronauts go to Mars.”