By the mid-1970s, though, May put his otherworldly studies on hold as Queen achieved its status as one of the most famous rock bands in history.
The hiatus lasted 30 years. Since then, May has not only received his doctorate, but has also put his skills to the test at NASA — even helping to prevent a recent mission from biting the dust.
It all started when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft — an acronym for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer — was launched off the coast of Florida in 2016. The mission was to collect samples from asteroid Bennu, a relic from the birth of the solar system with a 1 in 2,700 chance of smacking into Earth in the year 2182.
Bennu, named after the ancient Egyptian birdlike deity of creation and rebirth, is believed to be the product of a cataclysmic collision that caused a Connecticut-sized asteroid to break apart, according to NASA. Bennu is one of the scattered pieces — an approximately 4.5 billion-year-old compilation of rock chunks loosely held together by gravity that orbits the sun every 1.2 years.
In 2018, OSIRIS-REx reached Bennu’s orbit. But the problem wasn’t so much reaching Bennu as it was landing atop an asteroid that scientists believed held the early solar system’s secrets. The plan for the mission was to touch down on an area engineers referred to as “the beach” for its fine-grained material, The Washington Post previously reported. Yet they quickly came to realize there was no sandy beach — Bennu was actually a rubble pile littered with boulders.
That’s where May came in. Shortly before the spacecraft launched in 2016, May met with Dante Lauretta, the leader of the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission. The two struck up a friendship based on their mutual interest in space and a shared love for Tucson.
“As the OSIRIS-REx mission progressed, I couldn’t help but share some of the latest developments with him,” Lauretta wrote in the preface of “Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid,” a book he co-authored with May. “ … To my delight, Brian showed a keen interest in the mission and the science behind it. It was clear that he was not just a casual fan, but a true space enthusiast and an advocate for space exploration.”
Eventually, Lauretta brought May on to the mission, where the rock star played a key role: helping the spacecraft touch down on Bennu.
To find a safe spot for the spacecraft to land, the rock-star physicist developed stereoscopic images of Bennu’s surface, May detailed in the book. Stereoscopic imaging is a technique that injects a depth effect to flat images — kind of like 3D glasses.
Though OSIRIS-REx’s cameras produced only two-dimensional shots, scientists meticulously mapped each inch of Bennu’s surface. May then processed the scene by clipping together pairs of side-by-side images — “allowing us to see Bennu’s rugged and rough landscape in glorious 3-D,” Lauretta wrote in the preface of “Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid.”
The rugged landscape gave birth to a new problem, he added.
“Seeing Bennu’s surface in this way really brought home the intimidating reality of this asteroid,” Lauretta wrote. “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.”
Then, May’s images showed a crater — the Nightingale Crater, to be exact. Though a boulder known as “Mount Doom” was dangerously looming at its edge, the Nightingale Crater’s color suggested it was full of ancient regolith, or a dusty blanket of deposits that could shed light into Bennu’s history. Scientists decided that was the place where the spacecraft’s robotic arm should touch down and begin taking samples.
In October 2020, the samples were recovered from a surface that surprisingly acted like a “liquid droplet,” Lauretta previously told The Post — the product of weak gravity loosely holding particles together and turning the asteroid into a cosmic plastic ball pit. The descent was captured in a three-dimensional segment May helped the team put together, showing how bits of dust and shards flew around — some into OSIRIS-REx’s sample chamber.
By 2021, when the spacecraft started its return voyage to Earth, OSIRIS-REx had collected about 250 grams of material — more than the originally planned for 60 grams in what was NASA’s first-ever sample return mission.
On Sept. 24, those samples finally reached Earth after they were hurled from deep space via parachute into the Utah desert. The spacecraft, which is now heading to the asteroid Apophis, dropped the box from 63,000 miles away. After a four-hour drop, the box landed — perfectly upright — onto the Utah Test and Training Range, where it was collected for further assessment.
Yet May couldn’t witness the extraplanetary drop in person — much like in the ’70s, his rock-star responsibilities got in the way.
“I’m rehearsing for a Queen tour, but my heart stays with you as this precious sample is recovered,” May said in a video that aired on NASA TV on Sept. 25.
What’s inside the sample box still remains a mystery as “the initial curation process for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample of asteroid Bennu is moving slower than anticipated,” NASA said in a news release, “but for the best reason: the sample runneth over.”
May posits it could be something extraordinary.
“This box when it is opened of material from the surface of Bennu can tell us untold secrets of the origins of the universe, the origins of our planet and the origins of life itself,” the guitarist said in a video posted on his website. “What an incredibly exciting day.”
Perhaps it will warrant a song, like the space anthem May released in 2019 to commemorate NASA’s New Horizons probe’s flyby into the farthest object in our solar system ever visited by a spacecraft — another space mission he contributed to.