Brian May has shared a video to mark the NASA New Horizons probe’s close encounter with Ultima Thule.
The Queen guitarist premiered his track named after the spacecraft on January 1, the day the probe passed Ultima Thule – an object located a billion miles beyond Pluto – in the Kuiper Belt.
May has now shared what he describes as “perhaps the shortest full-length movie in the world” showing the New Horizons flyby which is accompanied by a portion of his track.
The guitarist says on his website: “To produce this movie, it took 13 years of space travel, about $700 million, and the expertise of hundreds of NASA engineers, navigators, astrophysicists and rocket scientists.
“The core team of the mission, called New Horizons, is under the direction of a genius called Alan Stern, who has driven the whole project since around 2010, when he began convincing the whole world that Mankind needed to find out what Pluto was like in close-up.
“The New Horizons mission succeeded in the incredibly difficult task of directing a probe roughly the size and shape of a grand piano three billion miles to an accuracy of a couple of hundred, achieving the first flyby in history of what we all knew in our childhood as the ninth planet, Pluto.
“I was lucky enough to be adopted as a guest at that time, and made some great friends in the team.”
May adds: “A couple of years and another billion miles later, the NH probe was set to perform a flyby of an object even more remote – a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO). Alan Stern asked me along again for the occasion, and invited me to make music for the mission. The rest is history I guess.
“I’m proud to reveal this very short movie which depicts completely faithfully the whole approach sequence – plus the glimpse the probe captured looking back towards the Sun at the ‘crescent’ view of the KBO after the encounter. OK! The star of our film is a KBO called 2014 MU69, or Ultima Thule. Shall we start courting the Oscar nominations now?”
May will release New Horizons as a 12-inch single on April 13 to mark Record Store Day.
