NASA launched the Cassini spacecraft in October of 1997, the same year Trent Reznor recorded the soundtrack for Lost Highway. In June of 2004, five months before the re-release of Nine Inch Nails’ seminal album, The Downward Spiral, the Cassini spacecraft reached Saturn, arguably the coolest planet for its abundance of rings and moons. Which are two planetary characteristics that Earth lacks, making it kind of lame. In any case, 2004 is the year that Cassini began shooting the spooky footage that has revolutionized humanity’s understanding of Saturn and its moons.In 2008, Nine Inch Nails recorded Ghosts I-IV, featured in the cool video above. As much as I’d hoped that Chris Abbas, the filmmaker who synced the industrial revolutionaries Brian Eno-tinged instrumentation to the Cassini footage had done some sort of thing where the music and video reflected a timeline of Nine Inch Nails’ work and the time it took Cassini to reach Saturn and send footage back to us, he didn’t. But then Abbas would have maybe felt forced to use Closer and The Hand That Feeds in the video, and I can understand why neither would work. Good call, Chris.Follow Motherboard on TwitterConnections
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