Apple and NASA collaborate on Jupiter-themed short film 'Visions of Harmony'

To commemorate the impending arrival of NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter, Apple and the space agency released a new short film on iTunes and Apple Music on Thursday featuring original music by artists like Weezer and Nine Inch Nails frontman and Apple executive Trent Reznor.

The film, "Visions of Harmony," is themed around NASA's Juno probe and tries to connect the seemingly disparate worlds of space exploration and music. Juno arrives at Jupiter on July 4, where it will try to probe more deeply under the gas giant's atmosphere. The spacecraft has been en route for nearly five years.

Both the short and the associated music can be found under a new Destination: Jupiter page. Some of the other musicians highlighted there include GZA the Genius, Brad Paisley, and Jim James.

Apple separately released a new video promoting the one-year anniversary of Beats 1. The spot features the radio station's three main DJs — Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden, and Julie Adenuga — but largely clips of the various celebrity guests and hosts the station has had, such as Taylor Swift, Dr. Dre, Puff Daddy, One Direction, and others.

Beats 1's premiere also marked the launch of Apple Music, which now has some 15 million subscribers. Unlike Apple Music, Beats 1 is free to the public.

2 Comments

bigmike 266 comments · 16 Years

About 8 years ago

No, Apple. Please, no. Apple + Never A Straight Answer doesn't have a good ring to it.

Marvin 15332 comments · 18 Years

About 8 years ago

bigmike said:

No, Apple. Please, no. Apple + Never A Straight Answer doesn't have a good ring to it.

The movie has more of a focus on music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzNbIjUEJ7g

It's a philosophical clip where people talk about the idea of everything being connected. NASA is mostly a jobs program:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

They hire tens of thousands of people and get ~$15-20b per year in government funding (over $1 trillion total) so they always have to be drumming up public interest in what they do. If NASA ever said that they've looked everywhere in the universe and there's no answers out there, they'd get their funding cut just like any special interest group.

They have to just keep sending probes out to explore parts of the universe and most of their time is spent researching and training for it.

http://www.nasa.gov/about/highlights/what_does_nasa_do.html

"NASA's vision: We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.
To do that, thousands of people have been working around the world -- and off of it -- for more than 50 years, trying to answer some basic questions. What's out there in space? How do we get there? What will we find? What can we learn there, or learn just by trying to get there, that will make life better here on Earth?"
People tend to separate different fields of interest out like science, art, mathematics, music but they all influence each other. The way people write music is influenced by their environment and how the world evolved to the present. NASA is trying to find answers about the starting point and the nature of the universe.
It's a pretty tenuous link to justify spending billions to send a probe to Jupiter. Juno was delayed because of budget restrictions. They want to find out more about how the planet is formed and remains stable as Jupiter doesn't have a solid surface, it's a ball of liquid/gas:
http://science.nasa.gov/missions/juno/
NASA probably had a meeting about how they make a Jupiter probe interesting to millennials (some of whom will be approving their budgets in future) and came up with the idea of using Apple Music. If they want to interest young people in space, they should just send a nuke out and blow Jupiter up or send Matt Damon out to grow potatoes somewhere. Elon Musk has the right idea:
http://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-clarifies-his-plan-to-nuke-mars-1734457751