Rockstar Brian May Teams Up With NASA's Bennu Mission

Thursday - August 3 2023, 05:15 UTC - 1 year ago

Brian May, the British rock star, and Dante Lauretta, the chief scientist of NASA's Bennu asteroid-sampling OSIRIS-REx mission, partnered up to collaborate on their book Bennu: 3-D Anatomy of an Asteroid. May used his imaging skills to carefully select and align 2D images of OSIRIS-REx, which allowed the team to spot two craters suitable for the mission.

It’s not every day that a rockstar helps a NASA mission. However, according to a new book by Dante Lauretta, the chief scientist of NASA's Bennu asteroid-sampling OSIRIS-REx mission, and Queen guitarist Brian May, that’s exactly what happened.

The pair discussed their collaboration at the launch of "Bennu: 3-D Anatomy of an Asteroid", an event held at the Natural History Museum in London on Thursday. This is according to a report by IFL Science published on Monday.

It turns out it is not May’s first space venture. The artist, who holds a Ph.D. in astronomy, was also part of the teams behind Europe's comet-chasing Rosetta probe and NASA's Pluto explorer New Horizons.

Not an easy ride .

He joined the OSIRIS-REx team in January 2019 after Lauretta extended an invitation. However, this was not going to be an easy ride, as Lauretta made it clear that he expected the rock star to earn his keep.

May's skill set came to be quite useful to the mission. He had a keen interest in stereoscopic imaging, a technique that allows viewers to perceive the depth and distance between the structures present in 2D images. This was quite important as OSIRIS-REx wasn't fitted with a stereo camera. May, who had previously produced 3D images of Comet 67P, the target of the Rosetta mission, and Pluto, as seen by New Horizons, proceeded to carefully select and align images taken by a single camera from different angles.

As scientists started receiving data from OSIRIS-REx, the researchers struggled to comprehend what they were facing from the two-dimensional snapshots captured by the spacecraft’s cameras. And so May’s unique imaging skills became particularly handy.

"I was amazed by the results that Brian and his collaborator Claudia Manzoni produced by processing our data in stereo images, allowing us to see Bennu's rugged and rough landscape in glorious 3-D," Lauretta wrote in the preface of the book. "Seeing Bennu's surface in this way really brought home the intimidating reality of this asteroid. It was far beyond our initial spacecraft design capabilities. At first, it seemed like our task was impossible, that we were never going to find a suitable location to collect our sample." .

Two landing craters .

May’s efforts paid off as he was able to spot two craters that were eventually deemed good enough to host a landing attempt for the spacecraft to collect samples from Bennu.

May told IFLScience that his participation in the Bennu mission left him truly happy.

"We assembled stereo images, 3D images, from all kinds of missions, and [being involved with the mission] was a kind of dream to me," Sir May told IFLScience. "Suddenly I had this real scientist who was sending me stuff to do and it becomes kind of like a job because it was a lot of hours to put in, but it's joy, it's just such a joy to work on these images." .