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In 1991 Freddie Mercury - flamboyant British lead singer of Queen, songwriter and record producer - died. In that same year asteroid 17473 was discovered.

On September 5, 2016 it would have been Freddie Mercury's 70th birthday. It was marked with an announcement that asteroid 17473 was now Asteroid 17473 Freddiemercury, officially named by the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union. Here is the certificate to comemmorate the asteroid's naming.

You can find out more here about Naming Asteroids.

As if to coincide with the successful touchdown of the Rosetta mission on comet 67P, Vangelis's beautiful soundtrack to the mission has entered the UK Top 40 chart!

In April 1986 Jean-Michel Jarre's studio album Rendez-vous was released. It sold around three million copies worldwide. But something was missing. The final track was supposed to have included the saxophone part recorded on the shuttle Challenger, which would have been the first piece of music recorded in space.

Astronaut Ron McNair, who had a PhD in physics from M.I.T., was also an accomplished saxophonist. But he was killed, along with his crewmates, when the the shuttle broke up 73 seconds after liftoff.

Here is Dernier rendez-vous (Last rendezvous), saxophone by Pierre Gossez. (It stops suddenly, I don't know how much has been chopped off the end.)

Hello Mona,

Thanks for this link - I listened and it surely was music to float in heavens and even meditate by, and the images of space were amazing as well.

Of course it led to revisiting the footage of the explosion of Challenger in 1986 which still shocks the system even after all this time. I remember watching it on TV live on the day and remember too feeling at one with America and the world in the shock and tragedy of the event. I don't think I have ever felt as 'universal and one' in quite the same way since except I guess when I read poetry sometimes.

Anyway, cheers