"Interstellar Concert": ESA Beams "True Unofficial Space Anthem" To NASA's Voyager 1

A performance of Austrian composer Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube was beamed into space for an unusual audience over the weekend. The waltz, composed in 1866, was recorded by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra before being sent over 24.9 billion kilometers (15.5 billion miles) to NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft.

If you're a sci-fi fan, you are probably familiar with The Blue Danube (An der schönen blauen Donau) thanks to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the composition is played as spacecraft dance around the Earth. If you're a Simpsons fan, you may also recognize it from the scene where Homer floats through a space shuttle eating Cheetos in order to prevent a catastrophe.

According to Norbert Kettner, director of the Vienna tourist board, the tune has become a "true unofficial space anthem" thanks to its inclusion in Kubrick's 1968 epic, AFP reports. Despite this, the song was not chosen for inclusion in the Voyager Golden Record, a collection of sounds and images selected to represent life on Earth which were launched with the Voyager spacecrafts in 1977.

Approaching the 200th birthday of Strauss, the European Space Agency (ESA) played a part in making up for this omission, transmitting a performance of the waltz to both Voyager 1 and 2 on Saturday. The "interstellar concert" sent the performance in the form of electromagnetic waves after digitizing it, using a 35-meter (114-foot) satellite dish at ESA's Cebreros ground station in Spain. The signal took around 23 hours and 3 minutes to reach Voyager 1, at a distance of around 167 AU, with 1 AU being the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and a similar journey time to reach Voyager 2. Of course, the music will not stop there, but continue on into interstellar space at the speed of light. 

This isn't the first time the "unofficial space anthem" has been played for the benefit of spacecraft. As NASA spaceship Discovery docked with the ISS in 2001, it was appropriately played as the crew arrived and changed over.

The recent performance, organized by Vienna Symphony Orchestra director Jan Nast, was aimed at correcting the composition's omission on the Voyager Golden Record, which included Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F (first movement), Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (first movement), and Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode. 

Nast added in a statement to AFP that music is a language which "which touches many people" and has "the universal power to convey hope and joy". Fingers crossed aliens share that understanding, should they stumble across the signal in hundreds or thousands of years' time.