How Queen’s guitarist Brian May helped NASA analyse asteroid Bennu | Technology News

May graduated with BSc degree in Physics with honours from Imperial College London in 1968, before the formation of Queen. He started work on a PhD degree in astrophysics in 1971 but he only got back to it and completed it in 2007. He was a little busy in the period in between, being the lead guitarist of the legendary rock band Queen aloq

Manzoni and May were tasked to see whether stereoscopic imaging could be done using the images captured of the asteroid Bennu by the spacecraft. Stereoscopic imaging or stereoscopy refers to how an illusion of depth is added to a flat image to create a three-dimensional effect.

“To do this, we looked for pairs of images of Bennu’s surface taken from viewpoints some distance apart. This separation of viewpoints, known as the “baseline,” has to be just right to give us the experience of depth and reality when the images are viewed stereoscopically. Such viewing requires the left and right images to be delivered separately to our left and right eyes, which is how we see in “real life.” When this is done, the small differences between the components of the stereo pair – known as parallax differences – give our brains the opportunity to instantaneously perceive depth and solidity in the image,” wrote May in a guest blog for NASA.

Stereoscopic image of asteroid Bennu sample. (Credit: Erika Blumenfeld, Joseph Abersold for the original images/Brian May, Claudia Manzoni for stereo processing of the images)

The above stereoscopic image is of the Bennu samples that were delivered to Earth. In the moments when the “TAGSAM” sample collecting head was flipped over, NASA” curation team took photographs from many angles, which allowed May and his fellow scientists to create one nearly perfect stereoscopic image of the sample. If you view this image through a stereoscope, it will appear to be almost 3D.