NASA astronaut dialed 911, called space police, says not a prank call

New Delhi : Besides police stations on the earth, do you know that our astronauts in space too have police assistance? Scientists up in space can make a call from hundreds of miles away from human civilization. 

In a bizarre incident, Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers accidentally tested it out anyway.  In a recent interview with Dutch public broadcaster Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS), he described an incident where he'd accidentally dialled the 911 US emergency services number while in orbit on the space station.

Astronaut Kuipers from the European Space Agency was on board the ISS around 2006. "If you're in space, it's like you're making a call via Houston, first you dial the 9 for an outside line, and then 011 for an international line," Kuipers told NOS.

Dialling emergency space police number

Kuipers once forgot the zero in that series, and accidentally ended up dialling emergency services. Of course, that set off a panic at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and a security team had to rush to where the call had been placed.

Later scientists realised that there was nothing wrong. "The next day I received an email message: did you call 911?" He also mentioned that he was a little disappointed that no one had responded to his call.