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

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.