Brian May was in rehearsals Sunday in London for the Queen+Adam Lambert tour, but he kept his eye on NASA’s mission to bring a sample of Bennu, the largest asteroid, back to Earth that same day.
He not only had an interest in it being an astrophysicist, but also because he helped in identifying the site from which the sample was taken.
May and Claudia Manzoni, one of the contributors to his new 3D stereoscopy book, Bennu – The Asteroid Atlas, aided in the shortlist of possible sample sites for NASA’s Osiris-Rex probe to collect dirt and gravel when it touched down on Bennu in 2020.
The probe landed in the Utah desert on Sunday and May tells the BBC, “I always say you need art as well as science. 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.” Here is Brian May on the significance of NASA’s mission to collect dirt and gravel from asteroid Bennu.
“The sample of a piece of material from Bennu, the asteroid most likely to hit the Earth in the future, can tell us untold secrets of the origins of the Universe, the origins of our planet, and the origins of life itself.”
REUTERS PHOTO
