Sir Brian May has said he is “immensely proud” to be part of the team who successfully collected NASA’s first asteroid samples from deep space.
A capsule containing around 250g of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu touched down in the Utah desert near Salt Lake City on Sunday.
Earlier in the day, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule around 63,000 miles out during a flyby of Earth.
Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Sir Brian aided the mission by helping to identify where Osiris-Rex could grab a sample from the asteroid.
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In a message of support shown on NASA TV, Sir Brian said: “Hello Nasa folks, space fans, asteroid aficionados, this is Brian May of Queen but also I’m immensely proud to be a team member of Osiris-Rex.
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“I can’t be with you today, I wish I could, I’m rehearsing for a Queen tour, but my heart is there with you as this precious sample is recovered.
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“Happy sample return day and congratulations to all who worked so incredibly hard on this mission.”
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The rocker particularly praised his “dear friend” Dante Lauretta, who he created the book Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid with, which is a 3D atlas of the asteroid.
The sample is the US space agency’s first mission to collect a sample from an asteroid and the first by any agency since 2020.
A quarter of the sample will be given to a group of more than 200 people from 38 globally distributed institutions, including a team of scientists from the University of Manchester and the Natural History Museum.
Asteroid Bennu is a 4.5-billion-year-old remnant of our early solar system and scientists believe it can help shed light on how planets formed and evolved.
Experts say the carbon-rich, near-Earth asteroid serves as a time capsule from the earliest history of the solar system.
