Queen guitarist Brian May helped NASA secure asteroid samples
Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May assisted in a recent NASA mission to secure asteroid samples.
May first studied physics at Imperial College London in the late 1960s. He began working on a PhD in astrophysics in 1971, finally completing it in 2007. Now, he has utilised his expertise in stereoscopy to assist NASA.
Stereoscopy includes taking two photos from different angles, which can then be put together to form a 3D scene. The legendary guitarist used this to identify a location on the asteroid, Bennu, which was safe to sample without damaging the spacecraft. The mission is estimated to have secured 250g of dust from the asteroid.
Speaking with the BBC, May stated, “I always say you need art as well as science”. He continued, “It’s like an artistic thing. You need to feel the terrain to know if the spaceship is likely to fall over or if it will hit this ‘rock of doom’ that was right on the edge of the eventual chosen site, called Nightingale. If that had happened it would have been disastrous. There were a billion dollars of American taxpayers’ money at stake.”
May also took to Instagram to share his achievements, sharing photos of the capsule with the caption, “And the Sample Return Capsule finally comes to rest back home on Earth. Sitting very alone in the middle of the Utah desert, its surface charred from its fiery transit through the atmosphere, it looks like a lost pet about to be joyfully reunited with its guardian. But now, after a round trip of more than a billion miles, it holds in its belly the precious stones and dust it was sent to collect from the asteroid Bennu.”
Scientists are hoping that those precious stones and dust will help to explain the beginning of life on Earth.
Check out the photos and May’s full statement below.
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