Tune in now to the planetary conference – New Horizons team speaking now. https://livestream.com/viewnow/lpsc2019.
WITH STEREO SOUND
The Grand Ultima Thule Flyby – Also https://youtu.be/gTYBiTvW7FU
The Grand Ultima Thule Flyby !
Here it is ! Perhaps the shortest full-length movie in the world !! It’s also packed with real science and astro technological achievement. To produce this movie, it took 13 years of space travel, about 700 million dollars, 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 3 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.
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. My New Horizons track premiered in NASA TV on New Years Day 2019, is about to be released on vinyl for Record Store day, and can be found on our YouTube channels.
And today 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 ?!
Enjoy !
Bri
PS. This piece of music was planned to provide the conclusion (the coda) of the incomplete video which already exists for the full-length New Horizons track. If this sounds confusing, I’ll explain later !!! Meanwhile special thanks to the brilliant Harpist Maria Banks – for a special uplift !!
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