Sir Brian May spoke to Channel 4 News about his role in supporting the latest Nasa mission to extract dust and debris from an asteroid and bring it back to earth for the first time. The astrophysicist said he hoped the Osiris-Rex mission would help us understand and find the seeds of life on earth. Report by Etemadil. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 I played a small role, but the role was to try and make sure that the spacecraft was safe
00:06 as it collected that sample, because if it had fallen into the rubble,
00:10 nothing would have got back to Earth, which would have been a bit of a tragedy
00:13 after spending billions of dollars on the whole project.
00:16 Stereoscopic imaging has been my passion for a long time
00:19 because it gives you such an incredible feeling of being there,
00:22 it gives you an intuitive idea of what the terrain's like.
00:25 So this all began for me when I sent some of our stereo images
00:30 that we'd made from the data that had come back already from the spacecraft
00:34 as it was orbiting Bennu.
00:36 So I put some of these stereos together with my wonderful collaborator,
00:39 Claudia Manzoni, and we sent them to Dante,
00:43 who's the chief scientific officer of the project, if you like,
00:47 and he was amazed because they were looking for a safe place to land,
00:50 and it was much more difficult than they'd anticipated.
00:53 They thought they were going to land on a solid body like the Moon
00:56 and they could just bump down, take the sample and go away.
00:59 What in fact they found was a rubble pile, which is not a term of abuse,
01:04 it's an actual scientific designation now.
01:07 It's a pile of rubble very loosely held together by gravity,
01:10 so there was a real risk that the spacecraft may land and topple over.
01:14 We had to find a safe spot, so stereoscopic imaging
01:17 suddenly gave them a nice intuitive view of the possible landing spots.
01:21 What do you hope, with your astrophysics hat on
01:24 rather than your guitar hat on, of course,
01:26 what do you hope that we can learn from this dust that's been gathered?
01:30 Well, the greatest thing would be if we could find the seeds of life itself.
01:37 That's always the dream.
01:39 And there is hope of that because, of course,
01:41 we get stones through the atmosphere every day coming from outer space,
01:44 they're called meteorites, but they're all burned up
01:47 by the time they get to the surface of the Earth
01:49 and they get contaminated by the air.
01:52 These samples are pristine and some of them are incredibly delicate.
01:55 They're sort of very friable, like a sort of crunchy bar or something,
01:59 so they would never get through the Earth's surface.
02:02 The fact that this magical box has managed to get them back to Earth intact
02:06 is very significant.
02:08 We can examine them, and this is something we've never actually seen before
02:11 on the Earth's surface.