Austrian composer Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube has, for many people, been synonymous with space travel since it was used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
However, the world famous waltz truly traveled among the stars yesterday, when the European Space Agency’s (ESA) antenna broadcast a live performance of it into space to celebrate the composer’s 200th birthday.
The Vienna Symphony Orchestra was to play a concert in the Austrian capital from 7:30pm, ESA director-general Josef Aschbacher said.
The concert was to be broadcast live on the Internet and shown at a public screening in Vienna, New York and near the antenna in Spain.
“The digitized sound will be transmitted to the large 35m satellite dish at ESA’s Cebreros ground station in Spain,” and from there, the waltz will be “transmitted in the form of electromagnetic waves,” he said.
The Blue Danube evokes the elegance of 19th-century imperial Vienna, which lives on in the city’s roaring ball season.
For Norbert Kettner, director of the Vienna tourist board, the Danube waltz is a “true unofficial space anthem,” because of Kubrick.
It is the “typical sound of space,” Kettner said, with the tunes being played “during various docking manoeuvres of the International Space Station (ISS).”
The Vienna Symphony Orchestra would make sure to underline the waltz’s airiness as if it were floating through space, orchestra director Jan Nast said.
Music is a language “which touches many people” and has “the universal power to convey hope and joy,” said Nast, who put together the program for yesterday’s hour-long “interstellar concert.”
Once transmitted via Spain’s satellite dish, the signal was to travel to reach NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft — the most distant man-made object in the universe — in approximately 23 hours and 3 minutes.
After surpassing Voyager 1, it would continue its interstellar journey.
By catching up with the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, Austria also seeks to right a perceived wrong.
Both Voyagers carry “Golden Records” — 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials. The record holds 115 images of life on Earth, recorded in analog form, and a variety of sounds and snatches of music.
While The Magic Flute by composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was included among the selection of 27 music pieces, Strauss’ famous waltz was not.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS