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ACROSS THE UNIVERSE: At 4:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time today, NASA sent a transmission of the old Beatle’s song, Across the Universe, to Polaris, the North Star. The reasons why NASA did this were nostalgia-driven; the transmission celebrated the 40th anniversary since the Beatles created this classic song, the 45th anniversary of NASA’s Deep Space Network (a series of large radio dishes in California, Australia and Spain that are used to maintain communication with all the space probes scattered throughout our solar system) and the 50th anniversary since the founding of NASA itself.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California was responsible for beaming the transmission, since JPL runs the Deep Space Network. It took 6 minutes for the song to be radioed up into space, and it’s gonna take 430 years for it to reach Polaris (that's because it's 430 light years, or 4 quadrillion miles, from Earth). And another 430 years for us to get a peaceful or hostile response by whatever alien civilization may be lurking near the North Star. Unless they respond by sending a fleet of spacecraft (a la the 1996 film Independence Day) to Earth first. Just being facetious. That’s all.


NASA JPL