‘Out of this world’: NASA JPL beams Missy Elliott hit to planet Venus
Temperatures on Venus hover around 870 degrees, but the second-closest planet to the sun got a little bit cooler recently when NASA showered it with Missy Elliott’s hit song “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly).”
The feat took place at 10:05 a.m. July 12, when NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge beamed the song via a 112-foot-wide radio dish antenna near Barstow, Calif.
The signal crossed the solar system at the speed of light, covering a distance of about 158 million miles in just 14 minutes.
During a career at JPL that spanned more than half a century, Pete Theisinger worked on missions to six planets, including Mars rovers and Voyager.
The transmitter, which is coincidentally also named Venus, is part of the Deep Space Network, or DSN. The network is an array of radio antennas that’s used to track, send commands and receive scientific data from spacecraft headed to the moon and elsewhere in the solar system.
NASA catapulted Elliott, who released the song on July 15, 1997, into the record books. It was the first hip-hop track, and only the second song ever, that NASA has radioed into space. The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” was the first.
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The “Evening Star” — which is also known as the “Morning Star” when visible at sunrise — is the artist’s favorite planet.
“I still can’t believe I’m going out of this world with NASA through the Deep Space Network when ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’ becomes the first ever hip-hop song to transmit to space!” Elliott said in a NASA statement ahead of the event. “I chose Venus because it symbolizes strength, beauty, and empowerment and I am so humbled to have the opportunity to share my art and my message with the universe!”
NASA’s collaboration with the futuristic artist arises as the agency prepares for two upcoming, uncrewed Venus missions aimed at gathering data about the mysterious planet, where an atmosphere made up mostly of carbon dioxide and clouds of sulfuric acid create unlivable conditions for Earthlings.
The spacecraft launched in 1977 and is now 15 billion miles from Earth. It went silent in November. Scientists at JPL figured out how to get it talking again.
The partnership is fitting because “both space exploration and Missy Elliott’s art have been about pushing boundaries,” said NASA spokeswoman Brittany Brown, who initially reached out to Elliott’s team.
The interplanetary music drop took place on the second night of Elliott’s swing through Los Angeles on her space-themed “Out of This World” Tour at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, the first headlining tour of her three-decade career. And it came days after the famous Cancer treated fans to a free party in downtown L.A. to celebrate her birthday — complete with an air show in which choreographed drones took the shape of her face as well as a flying saucer.
Opening the concert for Elliott were longtime producing partner Timbaland, the rapper Busta Rhymes and singer Ciara.
The “Get Ur Freak On” singer wowed fans again with dancers in glow-in-the-dark costumes, projections of spaceships and an animation of Elliott dressed as an astronaut and grinning as she glides through the cosmos. Fans were given wristbands with remote-controlled lights that flickered like stars to the beat.
At the close of the show, Elliott was lifted by a hydraulic riser with jets of smoke streaming around her, as if she were ascending to the heavens in the mother ship.
