Famed Queen guitarist and citizen astronomer Brian May collaborated with NASA's asteroid mission OSIRIS-REx, helping scientists find a suitable landing spot on the space rock that turned out to be completely different from what they had expected and designed their mission for.
May, who famously completed his PhD in astronomy in 2007 after a more than 30-year hiatus enforced by Queen's rise to fame in the early 1970s, sat down with Space.com to discuss his collaboration with the groundbreaking mission, NASA's first attempt to collect a piece of space rock and deliver it to Earth.
"Bennu: 3-D Anatomy of an Asteroid", authored by May and OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, is available in the U.S.from University of Arizona Press and in the U.K. from London Stereoscopic Company
May, who famously completed his PhD in astronomy in 2007 after a more than 30-year hiatus enforced by Queen's rise to fame in the early 1970s, sat down with Space.com to discuss his collaboration with the groundbreaking mission, NASA's first attempt to collect a piece of space rock and deliver it to Earth.
"Bennu: 3-D Anatomy of an Asteroid", authored by May and OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, is available in the U.S.from University of Arizona Press and in the U.K. from London Stereoscopic Company
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TechTranscript
00:00Hello everyone, my name is Teresa Polterva, I'm a senior writer at Space.com and today I have
00:04something really special for you. I'm here with Sir Brian May, the rock legend of Queen, who also
00:10happens to be a part-time astronomer and he was one of the scientists working with data and images
00:17coming from NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission. OSIRIS-REx was NASA's first mission to collect a sample from
00:25an asteroid and it will soon deliver this sample to Earth. And Sir Brian actually worked with Dante
00:32Loretta, OSIRIS-REx chief investigator, on a beautiful new book about asteroid Bennu and he is
00:41here now with us to tell us everything about this book and his collaboration with OSIRIS-REx. Thank
00:48you very much for finding time to talk to us, it's a great pleasure. So let me start at the beginning,
00:53you and OSIRIS-REx, how did the two of you get together? Well quite informally really because
01:00I'm on the outside of NASA and nobody pays me to do this but I love it and I and my collaborator
01:08Claudia Manzoni generally go around the internet to find things which we can make into stereos because
01:16the data is all there from all these different missions from NASA, from ESA, from JAXA, there is
01:22enough data there to find viewpoints in order to make the stereo images which we crave. We just love
01:28making stereo images and of course then you have to use a viewer to appreciate them in 3D and I mean
01:37I'm creator of the London Stereoscopic Company and we now make stereo viewers, we make 3D viewers.
01:43So what happened with me and Dante was I sent him just off the cuff a couple of his images which I'd made
01:51into 3D along with Claudia and he was amazed, he said I've never seen them like this, this is such a great
01:57tool and this might be able to help us find the landing site that we need in order to get our samples
02:03safely and so we started to interact and we started to trade emails and pictures and from that point
02:11on I mean we we've become very good friends during the the passage of time but a lot of work because
02:17when it became serious we're not just making pretty pictures we're supplying them with images that they
02:22can view and make that crucial decision. Is this a flat enough site to land our spacecraft? Will it be
02:29safe? Will we get the sample back to Earth? So that's what I became engaged doing and a lot
02:34of work but very very happy work. Is there any particular reason why you are interested in this
02:39mission? I'm interested in them all. I was incredibly lucky to be involved in the New Horizons mission
02:45with Alan Stern who also kind of took me under his wing and I was able to help secure 3D pictures of
02:53Pluto. See no one had ever seen Pluto close up before so I was able to bring
02:58I think the universe is first 3D picture of Pluto to light and they went on to photograph an object in
03:07the Kuiper belts as you probably know but yes Rosetta also we've made some lovely stereo images of maybe
03:13there's a book there too. I think the difference is that that Dante wanted to involve me and involve us
03:21at an early stage so that we could actually contribute to the conduct of the mission that's the crucial
03:25difference. I understand that you were actually called upon to help the team solve a major issue
03:31they had trying to find a suitable landing spot on the surface of an asteroid that looked very
03:37different than they expected it to. Do you remember how the atmosphere was among the scientists during
03:43this challenging time? Yeah well I think it was suddenly becoming much more difficult than they'd expected
03:49because Bennu wasn't a solid object with flat places it was a completely randomly accrued object it's a rubble pile
03:57and there are no places where it's safe to land apparently. There's only sort of different sizes of pebbles
04:05and it's very difficult to assess what the landing will actually be like if you can't be there and see it with your own eyes.
04:12That's where this comes in handy because once you have a stereo image of that particular potential landing site you can really make an instinctive judgment
04:20as to whether things are going to work out or not. You know how near is this boulder? How much slope is there?
04:26How dangerous is it to be to get it off and get on? So that's where we were able to get into it and I know that
04:33at one point Dante said look all my guys have to see this. I've seen it. This has changed my whole opinion.
04:39I want my whole team to see this. So I sent about a box of these and everybody sat around the table I think and made those decisions
04:47looking at Bennu as if they were there. So can you explain to us how do you create these stereo images?
04:53Basically to make a stereo image you need two different viewpoints. Just as in real life when I look at you my left eye has a
05:01viewpoint and my right eye has a viewpoint. Slightly different. I see more of your cheek here, more of your cheek here and that's the whole thing.
05:09I mean I've said it there. What do you have to do in making a stereo image is to reproduce that effect.
05:15So I have to take a picture from my left eye. I have to take a picture for my right eye and then I put him in a viewer
05:21like like this in the situation where my left eye only sees the left image and my right eye only sees the right image.
05:28Then the effect is reproduced. So I see this crater as if I were about a mile away from Bennu but my eyes are about a hundred thousand miles apart.
05:40No, not that far. Delete that. My eyes are about half a mile apart.
05:44So how did the idea for the book come about?
05:47We made so many images and it was a labour of love and it was also very rushed and I remember saying to Dante we should do the book.
05:56We have such an amazing collection of images. Not just of the details of the surface also of the whole planet which is something very attractive.
06:07And so we started to think of a book and we realised that it could be the world's first opportunity to make a real atlas of an asteroid.
06:17So that's what we attempted to do and the fact that it has stereo images as well I think makes it something very unique and special.
06:24So who is the book aimed at? Who is the target audience?
06:27The book is really aimed at anyone who has an interest in this kind of subject. Anyone who's interested in what they see when they look up in the night sky.
06:34It's not just for scientists. There's a lot of, well there's a whole world of scientific information in there for anyone who wants it.
06:41But if you read it as a story you should be able to understand it without prior knowledge.
06:45Thank you very much.