Missy Elliott has broken lots of boundaries, but until recently they were all Earth-based.
Last week, giant radio towers transmitted her song “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” to Venus for the benefit of whatever life-forms might have been around, or not, to listen.
The July 12 transmission, announced by NASA on Monday, was made at the speed of light by a 112-foot-wide radio dish near Barstow, Calif. It took the song 14 minutes to travel 158 million miles to Venus, Elliott’s favorite planet.
“My song ‘The Rain’ has officially been transmitted all the way to Venus, the planet that symbolizes strength, beauty and empowerment,” she wrote on social media. “The sky is not the limit, it’s just the beginning.”
As Elliott bantered with social media users on Monday, she uploaded pictures of planets, GIFs of dancing aliens and videos from her latest tour, “Out of This World.”
“The Rain” was transmitted to Venus through the Deep Space Network, a NASA system that helps the agency communicate with its far-flung spacecraft. In addition to the site in California, the network has some in Australia and Spain, each 120 degrees longitude apart. That way spacecraft can stay in touch even as the planet rotates.
In 1969, the network’s antennae heard from the astronaut Neil Armstrong as he planted his feet on the moon’s surface.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong said after stepping off the ladder of a landing craft. (There has been some debate over whether he said “man” or an indistinct “a man.”)
But “The Rain” is only the second song that the network has sent into space. The first, “Across the Universe” by the Beatles, was beamed to the North Star, Polaris, in 2008.
“Send my love to the aliens,” Paul McCartney, one of the two remaining Beatles, said at the time.
The North Star sits hundreds of light years away from Earth. In comparison, Venus, the second planet from the Sun, is right around the corner.
It’s also the only planet whose namesake is a female god. In ancient Rome, Venus was the goddess of love and beauty. The ancient Greeks knew her as Aphrodite.
The collaboration was NASA’s idea, the agency said in its statement.
“Both space exploration and Missy Elliott’s art have been about pushing boundaries,” Brittany Brown, NASA’s director of digital communications, said in the statement, which highlighted her use of space themes and futuristic visuals in music videos.
NASA did not say when the collaboration was proposed or whether other songs or artists were considered. A representative for Elliott, who last year became the first female hip-hop artist inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, could not be reached for comment overnight.
NASA has been playing music to astronauts for decades. In 1965, astronauts aboard an earth-orbiting spacecraft heard Jack Jones singing a parody of the Broadway hit “Hello, Dolly!”
In a similar vein, the actor Robin Williams sang a parody of the theme song for the television show “Green Acres” to the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1988.
“Here’s a little song coming from the billions of us to the five of you,” he told them.
Glen Nagle, a spokesman at the Deep Space Network’s site in Canberra, Australia, said in an email on Tuesday that NASA’s collaboration with Elliott was part of that tradition, and a key to engaging a new generation of “scientists, explorers and dreamers.”
“Artists such as Missy Elliott and the Beatles have had their music beamed into space to inspire humanity to think about Earth’s place in the cosmos — and maybe others, if they’re out there to hear it,” he said.
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