A high-pitched alarm is the last thing any astronaut working on the International Space Station ever wants to hear.
The thirty-second-long audio of the siren was sent to SoundCloud by the Columbus Control Centre, the operations centre for European Space Agency astronauts, based near Munich, Germany.
The alarm is played on the ISS to alert those onboard to life-threatening emergencies, such as a sudden loss of pressure or fire. Fortunately, these types of scenarios are extremely rare: despite the Space Station being used since 2000, the siren has only gone off a few times.
In the case of a real emergency, astronauts would immediately gather near their Soyuz spacecraft-- the orbiting platform's equivalent of lifeboats. Most astronauts on a six-month spaceflight only ever hear the sound during routine "fire drills".
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These regular drills are carried out to ensure that if the worst did happen all the ISS inhabitants would know exactly what to do. "Emergencies" are regularly re-enacted between the astronauts and mission controllers who run the Space Station in the USA, Russia, Europe and Japan.
As the astronauts are flying 400km above Earth, time is of the essence to ensure everyone works together to come to a fast solution. Such decisiveness could be the difference between the astronauts landing safely back with their feet on the ground, or an altogether more Gravity-like crisis.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
