MUMBAI: US space agency NASA undertakes an historic mission on 4 February when it will beam music into deep space for the first time ever. Though it has become commonplace to transmit music to manned spacecraft over the past 40 years as wake-up songs for astronauts — this will be the first time that a pure blast of music has been targeted to go further than an orbiting spacecraft.

This transmission is targeted at Polaris (The North Star), which is situated 2.5 quadrillion miles away. A quadrillion is one thousand million million. So 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away.) The song will take 431 years to reach Polaris — arriving in the year 2,439 AD.

The song selected for this mission is the classic Beatles peace anthem Across The Universe “to boldly go where no music has gone before…”

The historic event is to commemorate a series of coinciding anniversaries:

· 2008 is the 50th anniversary of the formation of NASA

· 2008 is also the 50th anniversary of key events in the formation of The Beatles

· The first US satellite (Explorer 1) was launched into space exactly 50 years ago

· February 4th is the exact 40th anniversary of the Beatles recording the song “Across The Universe”

To commemorate all these anniversaries, 4 February has been declared Across The Universe Day. As part of the celebrations, the public throughout the world has been invited to join NASA and create a “universal harmonic convergence” by simultaneously playing the song Across The Universe at the exact same time that it is being beamed across the universe.