By Lara Smith
London - Fans of British pop band Blur always thought their music was out of this world. Now it really will be.
A musical sequence recorded by the mega-selling foursome will herald the arrival of a British space probe on Mars.
The track will be beamed back to Earth when the probe, Beagle 2, lands on the Red Planet in December 2003.
It is part of the European Space Agency's Mars Express mission to find proof of life on Mars.
"It is partly based on a mathematical sequence with a few extra notes added," is how Professor Colin Pillinger, the lead scientist working on the British-led space project, described the ethereal recording.
"Most (probes) just send back a couple of digits in computer sequence. We thought, why not go the whole hog and send back something that will give us maximum media coverage?" Pillinger said on Wednesday.
Blur, who have enjoyed a string of No 1 hits including Parklife and Country House and have sold 10 million albums worldwide, have been involved with the space mission since 1998.
"Apparently one night while they were on the road, looking up at the sky, they got to thinking why Britain was not involved in space missions," said Pillinger of Britain's Open University.
"When they heard about our project they contacted us and we decided to join forces. At the time we didn't have the funding and they had a big media profile," he said.
Although drummer Dave Rowntree and bassist Alex James have been most closely involved with the space project, all four co-operated on choosing the notes for the digital recording.
"It suddenly came to them in a jam session," said Pillinger.
He said the sequence to be used as a call signal was very short, while the background track was a couple of minutes long.
The Beagle 2 - named after the ship HMS Beagle on which naturalist Charles Darwin sailed to the Galapagos Islands where he formed his theory on evolution - is scheduled to blast off from a site in Kazakhstan in May 2003.
And, if all goes according to plan, on December 23 2003, Blur's recording will tell the world "the Beagle has landed". - Reuters