After Being Passed Over, 'Blue Danube' Is Headed to Space

Johann Strauss' "Blue Danube" is heading into space this month to mark the 200th anniversary of the waltz king's birth, the AP reports. The classical piece will be beamed into the cosmos as it's performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. The celestial send-off on Saturday—livestreamed with free public screenings in Vienna, Madrid, and New York—also will celebrate the European Space Agency's founding 50 years ago. Although the music could be converted into radio signals in real time, ESA will relay a pre-recorded version from the orchestra's rehearsal the day before to avoid any technical issues. The live performance will provide the accompaniment.

The radio signals will hurtle away at the speed of light, 670 million mph. That will put the music past the moon in 1½ seconds, past Mars in 4½ minutes, past Jupiter in 37 minutes, and past Neptune in four hours. Within 23 hours, the signals will be as far from Earth as NASA's Voyager 1, the world's most distant spacecraft at more than 15 billion miles in interstellar space. ESA's big radio antenna in Spain, part of the space agency's deep-space network, will do the honors. The dish will be pointed in the direction of Voyager 1 so the "Blue Danube" heads that way.

NASA also celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008 by transmitting a song directly into deep space: the Beatles' "Across the Universe." And last year, NASA beamed up Missy Elliott's "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" toward Venus. Music has even flowed from another planet to Earth—courtesy of a NASA Mars rover. Flight controllers at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a recording of will.i.am's "Reach for the Stars" to Curiosity in 2012 and the rover relayed it back. These are all deep-space transmissions as opposed to the melodies streaming between NASA's Mission Control and orbiting crews since the mid-1960s.

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Now it's Strauss' turn, after getting passed over for the Voyager Golden Records nearly a half-century ago. Launched in 1977, NASA's twin Voyagers 1 and 2 each carry a gold-plated copper phonograph record, along with a stylus and playing instructions for anyone or anything out there. The records contain sounds and images of Earth as well as 90 minutes of music. The late astronomer Carl Sagan led the committee that chose Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky pieces, along with modern and Indigenous selections.

(More European Space Agency stories.)