Legendary guitarist Brian May, arguably probably the most famous citizen scientist on the planet, has spoken about his involvement with NASA’s historic asteroid sample collection mission, OSIRIS-REx.
The sample from an asteroid named 101955 Bennu was returned to Earth on Sept. 24,; May and fellow citizen scientist Claudia Manzoni were invited to look at visual data collected by mission principal investigator and University of Arizona researcher, Dante Lauretta.
May and collaborators searched through images taken of Bennu’s surface by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to search out opportunities to use a method called stereoscopy — which might principally add a 3D dimensional effect and illusion of depth to a 2D image.
“We searched for pairs of images of Bennu’s surface taken from viewpoints a long way apart,” May wrote in a NASA blog post. “This separation of viewpoints, generally known as the ‘baseline,’ must be good to provide us the experience of depth and reality when the pictures are viewed stereoscopically.”
Pairs of 2D images are required for stereoscopic imaging so a parallax effect can develop from subtle differences in each images taken with barely different viewpoints.
“Such viewing requires the left and right images to be delivered individually to our left and right eyes, which is how we see in ‘real life.’ When this is finished, the small differences between the components of the stereo pair — generally known as parallax differences — give our brains the chance to instantaneously perceive depth and solidity within the image,” May explained.
Images of the Bennu sample taken after its return to Earth within the Utah Desert were prime for such a stereoscopic approach.
“Within the moments when the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) head was flipped over after removing it from the avionics deck at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, photographs from many angles were captured, enabling us to search out only one (nearly!) perfect pair, showing the intimate structure of just a couple of grains of the dark, coal-black sample,” May said. “The curation team made it easy for us.”
Though the very best stereoscopic view of the sample and its roughly 1-centimeter-wide (0.4-inch-wide) grains of asteroid material requires using an actual stereoscope, it is feasible to mimic that false 3D view by relaxing the eyes and effectively “staring through” the screen.
Scientists and citizen scientists like May are keen to get a take a look at the fabric that makes up asteroids like Bennu because these rocky bodies are regarded as composed of matter that was present through the solar system‘s formation around 4.6 billion years ago. Which means these untouched asteroids could reveal the character of the fabric that collected together way back, gathering into overly dense patches of gas and mud that surrounded our infant sun to form what astronomers call a protoplanetary disk.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, launched in 2016 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, took two years to journey the 1,720-foot-wide (524-meter-wide) asteroid Bennu. After arriving at Bennu in August of 2018, the craft studied the asteroid from a distance for 2 years before dipping to the space rock’s surface and grabbing a sample. OSIRIS-REx began its 1.2 billion-mile (1.9 billion-kilometer) trip back home in 2021 and dropped the Bennu sample, safely inside a sample canister, into Earth’s orbit just last month. Then, the canister descended to the bottom.
But after dropping its essential cargo off in orbit and changing its name to OSIRIS-APEX, the spacecraft left Earth’s vicinity once more, starting a journey to the near-Earth asteroid Apophis. OSIRIS-APEX will reach an orbit across the 1200-foot (370-meter) wide space rock by 2029, enabling scientists to analyze yet one more space rock in stunning detail.