The classical waltz piece “Blue Danube”, by famed Austrian composer Johann Baptist Strauss II, will be beamed into the cosmos as it is performed by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. The celestial send-off on May 31 — 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, according to officials, 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, reports AP.
The radio signals will hurtle away at the speed of light, or a mind-blowing 670 million mph (more than 1 billion kph).
That will put the music past the moon in one and a half seconds, past Mars in four and a half 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 (24 billion kilometers) in interstellar space.
These are all deep-space transmissions as opposed to the melodies streaming between NASA’s Mission Control and orbiting crews since the mid-1960s.
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.
“Music connects us all through time and space in a very particular way,” ESA’s director general Josef Aschbacher said in a statement. “The European Space Agency is pleased to share the stage with Johann Strauss II and open the imaginations of future space scientists and explorers who may one day journey to the anthem of space.”