However, by the mid-1970s, May put her otherworldly studies on hold as Queen achieved their status as one of the most famous rock bands of all time.
The hiatus lasted for 30 years. Since then, May has not only completed his Ph.D., but also tried his skills at NASA and helped prevent his recent mission from ending in failure.
It all started when the Osiris-Rex spacecraft (an acronym for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security Regolith Explorer) launched off the coast of Florida in 2016. Its mission was to collect samples from the asteroid Bennu, a relic of Earth. The birth of a solar system that has a 1 in 2,700 chance of colliding with Earth in 2182.
Bennu, named after the ancient Egyptian bird-like god of creation and rebirth, is thought to be the product of a massive impact that caused a Connecticut-sized asteroid to break up. NASA. Bennu is one of the scattered fragments, a chunk of rock that was loosely held together by gravity about 4.5 billion years ago and orbits the sun every 1.2 years.
In 2018, Osiris-Rex reached Bennu’s orbit. But the problem wasn’t so much with Bennu as with Bennu’s landing on top of an asteroid that scientists believe holds the secrets of the early solar system. The plan for the mission was to land in an area that engineers called “the beach” because of its fine-grained material, The Washington Post previously reported. But they soon realized that there was no such thing as a sandy beach. Bennu was actually a pile of rubble strewn with rocks.
Then Mei appeared. Shortly before the spacecraft launched in 2016, May met with Dante Lauretta, the leader of the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission. The two formed a friendship based on a shared interest in space and a shared love for Tucson.
“As the Osiris-Rex mission progresses, I couldn’t help but share with him some of the latest developments,” Lauretta writes in the foreword.Bennu 3-D: Asteroid structureHe co-authored a book with May. “…I was pleased to see that Brian took a keen interest in his mission and the science behind it. He was more than just a fan, he was a true space enthusiast and champion of space exploration. It was clear that it was.”
Eventually, Lauretta takes May on a mission where Rockstar plays a key role in helping the spaceship land on Bennu.
To find a safe place for the spacecraft to land, the rock star physicist developed a three-dimensional image of Bennu’s surface, May details in his book. Stereoscopic imaging is a technique that adds depth effects to flat images, similar to 3D glasses.
Although OSIRIS-REx’s camera produced only two-dimensional shots, scientists carefully mapped each inch of Bennu’s surface. May then processed the scene by cutting out pairs of images placed side by side. “This allows us to see Bennu’s rugged and rugged landscape in stunning 3D,” Lauretta writes in the foreword to Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid. ”
The rugged terrain created new problems, he added.
“Seeing Bennu’s surface in this way really brought home the terrifying reality of this asteroid,” Lauretta wrote. “It was far beyond our original spacecraft design capabilities. At first, it seemed like our task was impossible and that we would never find a suitable location to collect samples. I did.”
May’s image then showed a crater, Nightingale Crater to be exact. A rock known as “Mount Doom” loomed dangerously on its edge, but Nightingale Crater’s color suggests that it is made up of ancient regolith, or dust deposits that could shed light on Bennu’s history. It suggested that it was filled with a dark blanket. Scientists determined that was where the spacecraft’s robotic arm would land and begin collecting samples.
In October 2020, the sample was surprisingly recovered from a surface that acts like a “droplet,” Lauretta previously told the Post. It’s a product of weak gravity that holds particles loosely together, turning the asteroid into a plastic ball pit in space. The descent was captured in his three-dimensional segment, which May helped the team create to show how pieces of dust and debris flew around, some of which ended up in Osiris-Rex’s sample chamber. .
By 2021, when the spacecraft began its return voyage to Earth, OSIRIS-REx had collected about 250 grams of material. This was the first sample return mission in NASA history, exceeding the 60 grams originally planned.
On September 24th, these samples finally reached Earth after being parachuted from deep space into the Utah desert. The spaceship heading now is asteroid apophis, dropped a box from 63,000 miles away. After a four-hour fall, the box was fully upright and fell to a test and training range in Utah, where it was recovered for further evaluation.
But May was unable to witness the off-planet fall firsthand – just like in the ’70s, his rock star responsibilities got in the way.
In a video aired on NASA TV on September 25, Prime Minister Theresa May said: “As we rehearse for Queen’s tour, I am very pleased that this precious sample will be recovered.” .
“The initial curation process for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx samples from asteroid Bennu has been slower than expected,” NASA said, noting that the contents of the sample box remain a mystery. news release“But the biggest reason is that the sample gets washed away.”
May claims it could be something extraordinary.
“This box, opened with materials taken from Bennu’s surface, will tell us untold secrets about the origin of the universe, the origin of Earth, and the origin of life itself,” said the guitarist. said in a video posted on his website.. “What an incredibly exciting day.”
May released it in 2019 to commemorate NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of the solar system’s most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft (another space mission he contributed to). We’re going to need a song like a cosmic hymn.