VIDEO. A space mission disrupted by… the radio of an Argentinian taxi

A truly bizarre story. While on a mission outside the International Space Station 430 kilometers from the earth, two Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopiev and Dimitri Peteline saw, on Wednesday April 19, their communication briefly scrambled, by the radio conversation of a Argentinian taxi coming from the surface of the earth. They heard, as did their colleagues inside the station, the message: “Uno-cinco-cero dijiste, by Yrigoyen?” A few words in Spanish that can be translated as “1-5-0 from Irigoyen, you said?”

If this message may seem quite enigmatic, it is, according to the Argentine daily profile from a conversation of an Argentinian taxi asking one of his customers for an address near Buenos Aires. Yrigoyen being the name of a former Argentinian president.

The frequencies at the center of the story

“This interference occurred, from what I understand, during the astronauts’ spacewalk,” indicates for his part Martín Salibe, responsible for technology transfer and liaison at the Argentine Institute of Radio Astronomy – CONICET, in the columns of the Spanish daily El Mundo. The frequencies used by the astronauts to communicate, between the inhabitants of the space station and those who are outside during the spacewalk, are the VHF and UHF bands. And one of them is similar to that used by radio taxis. This incident, fortunately, had no consequences.