IUP professor collaborates with Queen guitarist on book about Bennu asteroid

An Indiana University of Pennsylvania professor is part of a group of authors whose recent book explores the Bennu asteroid, which scientists believe is a sort of “time capsule” from the dawn of the solar system.

And since they were studying a rock, they recruited a rock star to help them out.

“Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid” contains a number of stereoscopic images of Bennu, along with a viewer that allows them to be seen in three dimensions.

And when it came to creating those images, the writing team turned to — who else? — Queen lead guitarist Sir Brian May, who just happens to be an astrophysicist in his spare time. IUP geoscience professor Kenneth Coles and May collaborated online over the course of a year before meeting at the book launch earlier this summer.

“The book is very visual – Brian (May) and Claudia (Manzoni’s) stereoscopic images are very beautiful and interesting – and it doesn’t read like something written by a bunch of nerdy scientists,” Coles said.

On Sept. 24, pieces taken from the asteroid, which was discovered in 1999, will return to Earth via the OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft launched in 2016 with the goal of reaching Bennu to study it for two years before carefully landing, obtaining samples and returning to Earth. When the spacecraft gets about 63,000 miles from Earth, it will fire a sample capsule back to the surface before heading back out to study other aspects of the solar system.

Lead author Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona said the Bennu asteroid was chosen for study because, out of the more than half-million recorded asteroids in space, it was reachable, large enough to be sampled by a spacecraft and is believed by scientists to contain compounds critical to the story of Earth’s formation.

“Our preliminary analysis of Bennu shows it is not very solid, but it is dense – we’ve joked that it’s kind of a rubble pile held together by weak gravity – but it has the kind of origins that we’d expect from the beginning of the solar system,” Coles said. “It has some light rocks on it from other asteroids, so that suggests pieces have broken off and landed on Bennu or its parent body.”

See more about the OSIRIS-REx mission in this NASA video:

Once the OSIRIS-REx capsule returns to Earth, science teams will analyze its samples looking for the presence of water, organic molecules and amino acids. Additional samples will be stored by NASA to be studied in the future.

Coles has shared his work regionally with the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh, where he serves as president. He will be sharing his experiences informally in the classroom this fall, including at a public planetarium presentation.

”Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid” is available from the University of Arizona Press and at retailers like Amazon.com.