Yesterday on January 1st 2019, Nasa’s New Horizons deep space probe flew past Ultima Thule. That’s a celestial object in the Kuiper Belt out past the orbit of Neptune, 4.1 billion miles from Earth.
Nasa maintains that Ultima Thule contains information about the origin of the solar system. It’s the furthest distance any spacecraft has ever travelled, and pictures are anticipated today, January 2nd.
To mark NASA’s historic New Horizons probe, Queen guitarist Brian May released a new track named after New Horizons, thankfully not Ultima Thule (pronounced Too Lay). The song is May’s first solo release since 1998’s Another World and the tune made its debut on NASA’s television channel a few minutes after midnight ET.
It was a collaboration between the Queen guitarist and Don Black and has a recording of Stephen Hawking on the track. You can check out the video for “New Horizons” below.
According to Ultimate Classic Rock, May worked on the New Horizons project as an astrophysicist and was present at the US-based Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. The song was sent to the probe a half-hour after its release.
Speaking from the lab, May said, “To me, it is the incredible newness of it. This is going way beyond where anyone has gone before, literally.”
Image: Credit: JHUAPL/SwRI
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