Song of the Day 3/24: Brian May, “New Horizons”

Filed in National by on March 24, 2019

As most rock fans know, Queen guitarist Brian May also holds a doctorate in astrophysics, a fact that earned him an invitation to join NASA’s team for New Horizons, a program that sent a probe to Pluto and beyond. After its Pluto flyby in 2015, the probe made for at the Kuiper Belt, a ring-shaped mass of small bodies beyond Neptune, and a 33-kilometer-long object nicknamed Ultima Thule. On Jan. 1 New Horizons passed with 3,500 km of the snowman-shaped object, which is 6.4 billion km from Earth, and Brian May released a new song to accompany a video of the occasion.

This week NASA released a 49-second video showing the probe’s approach to the planet, ending with a view of it in crescent in the “rear-view mirror,” so to speak. May again scored the film with what he says at his web site is the coda to the earlier piece. To infinity and beyond indeed.

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  1. Alby says:

    The real point of this wasn’t the music as much as the videos. I’ve replaced the Ultima Thule flyby video so you don’t have to cut and paste it. It’s 49 seconds well spent.

  2. Alby says:

    I would also like to point out that the agency that pulled off the feat of getting within 3,500 km of a target 6,400,000,000 km away is the same one that 10 out of 10 Republicans without college degrees think doesn’t know jack about global warming.