CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Strauss' ''Blue Danube'' is heading into space this month to mark the 200th anniversary of the waltz king's birth.
The classical piece will be beamed into the cosmos as it's 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.
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 1 ½ seconds, past Mars in 4 ½ 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.
NASA also celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008 by transmitting a song directly into deep space: the Beatles' ''Across the Universe.'' And last year, NASA beamed up Missy Elliott's "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" toward Venus.
Music has even flowed from another planet to Earth — courtesy of a NASA Mars rover. Flight controllers at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a recording of will.i.am's ''Reach for the Stars'' to Curiosity in 2012 and the rover relayed it back.
These are all deep-space transmissions as opposed to the melodies streaming between NASA's Mission Control and orbiting crews since the mid-1960s.
