Meet the rock guitarist who helped NASA land on an asteroid

As a working-class youth in London, Brian May first built his own telescope. Then he built his own electric guitar. Two days after earning a bachelor’s degree in physics, he was onstage with his band, opening for Pink Floyd. It was 1968.

Today May, 76, is known as one of the greatest guitarists in rock history. This month he’s back on the road with the latest incarnation of Queen, the legendary band he co-founded with Roger Taylor and the late Freddie Mercury. Also this month: publication day for May’s latest book, an atlas of the asteroid Bennu, featuring May’s stereoscopic photography.

I met May in 2015 when he was working with NASA’s New Horizons mission. He’s now a friend; we share a fascination with the stars (he earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics in 2007), as well as a deep and abiding love of animals (he’s an activist for animal welfare). I’ve been to more than a few of his concerts, often running into others backstage who are both Queen fans and space nerds (including a NASA official who once showed up with a copy of May’s doctoral thesis).

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

NADIA DRAKE: I’m betting that many people who know you as a musician have no idea you’re Dr. May—that you earned a Ph.D. studying zodiacal dust, a cloud of rocky grains that fills interplanetary space in our solar system. Why did you choose that topic?

BRIAN MAY: I knew you were going to ask. I was doing my graduate work in infrared astronomy at Imperial College in the 1970s, and one of the professors had been doing spectroscopic studies of zodiacal dust. It had come to a standstill because most of the equipment didn’t work anymore. So they said, Would you like to take this over? Once I looked at it, I thought, This is fascinating. It was something few people had done.

What did you want to know about the dust?

Very simply, where it comes from and where it’s going. Everybody else was studying the light reflected by the zodiacal cloud, but we were looking at how that cloud moved, by tracking an absorption line in the sun’s spectrum, which is Doppler shifted because of the motions of the dust relative to Earth. We thought that a component of the dust ought to be the debris shed by comets, and a certain amount of it might be from asteroids. I had this crazy idea that a small component might be interstellar because the solar system is moving through space. But I was kind of dismissed as a crank, and my supervisor said, “Don’t put that in the thesis, because everyone’s gonna laugh at you.”

But you were right?

The funny thing is, I thought I could see an interstellar element that was flowing through the solar system. But I never published that part of the data—after all, there were big error bars on my measurements. Looking back on it, I kind of wish I had because we now know that interstellar stuff is coming through all the time. Notably ‘Oumuamua, the interstellar object that zipped through in 2017. Now there’s a big lump of dust that sure didn’t come from inside our solar system—and there’s no knowing what we’re going to encounter next, is there?

You’ve moved on from dust and are now working a lot with asteroids and other small bodies in the solar system. Where does that interest come from?

That’s a passion, really. It connects to my interest in stereoscopic photography. All of the objects visited by uncrewed spacecraft lend themselves to 3D stereo images—for those, you need two different views of an object to make a stereo pair. And it is a very basic fact that everything in the solar system rotates. Which is fortunate, because rotation gives you the pair of views from slightly different angles that you need. I basically trawl the data from every space mission with a colleague of mine in Italy, and we find data to make 3D pictures.

We started to get friendly with some of the teams from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and once they saw what we were doing, the word spread to other missions. Our first great opportunity was New Horizons, which made history with its flyby of Pluto.

I remember running into you during the flyby in 2015. Such a fun time!

Watching that data come in was one of the greatest experiences of my life. We saw what Pluto looked like for the first time, and we got two different views: one just before the flyby and one that came in as the spacecraft was going by. I put a couple of those together and made the first 3D picture of Pluto.

I’ve done a lot of good stuff in my life—I’ve been very lucky—but that was one of the most thrilling moments I can remember: to suddenly see Pluto, which in my childhood was a white dot, in all its glorious detail in three dimensions. It was just a thrill beyond measure.

Now you’re working with the OSIRIS-REx team, which sent a spacecraft to the asteroid Bennu.

You May Also Like

MAGAZINE

Meet the Woman Who Wants to Solve the Universe’s Mysteries

SCIENCE

The 11 most astonishing scientific discoveries of 2023

SCIENCE

How fast is the universe really expanding? The mystery deepens.

That mission proved that stereo imagery isn’t just for fun; it can be useful too. Stereo can give you such an instinctive feel for terrain that it can help you choose a landing site. This was crucial at Bennu: The mission was to take a sample of the asteroid, so we were put to work making stereo pictures of every potential landing site. I think there were 24 of them. And we did it—we helped to choose the final site, and the samples were safely gathered.

What will we learn by studying this asteroid?

Asteroids are like time capsules from the early solar system. We can learn a lot about what this place was like 4.5 billion years ago by studying primordial material from Bennu.

They’re also a whole lot more important than people realized until recently. They’ve long been recognized as potential hazards. They’re also possible sources of minerals—people are talking about mining them. But what’s become more and more apparent is the role that asteroids must have played in setting up the Earth for us to be on it, for the biosphere to be here, by delivering water and organic molecules.

You suddenly realize that asteroids, as well as being the harbingers of death and destruction, must have played a crucial role in the creation of life on Earth. Then you develop a lot more respect for them.

What are the unanswered questions in astronomy, astrophysics, or planetary science that are the most compelling to you now?

A lot of things. I’m excited about this multiverse idea. It’s funny how these concepts start off as something which is crazy, and then everybody is talking about them as a very normal thing.

One of my favorite memories from your concerts is when special effects had you standing on an asteroid, surrounded by planets, riffing on Dvořák’s New World Symphony (photo at top).

I’m planning a new variation of that for the coming U.S. tour. I will be going further down that road. I love it. And those little planetoids around me are real objects; they’re not projections.

You’re at the center of your own planetary system! That’s typical of your approach to art and science: You mash up these fields. Why? And are they really so different from one another?

This is central to my life and my beliefs. I was told that I couldn’t do art and science as I progressed through school. And I was very resentful about that because I love them both. I feel like the rest of my life has been trying to prove them wrong. More and more and more, I’ve discovered that artistic thinking and scientific thinking are just different parts of the same thing. It’s a continuum. They’re inextricably linked. You have to have both sides to function at your full potential.

Creativity seems like another shared element there. To succeed in both fields, you must be willing to break the rules, to test new ideas, and ultimately to help people see the world in a different way.

Yeah, that’s right. I actually don’t think I had that talent as a Ph.D. student, or maybe I didn’t have enough confidence to apply it. When Queen started to move, when it looked like we could actually go out as a rock group, I was quite relieved to give up the Ph.D. I’d already written it up, I’d submitted it to my supervisor, and he’d rejected it and told me I had to go away and do more research.

I always thought science benefited from me going off and playing music for 30 years; I hope it’s also benefited from me coming back.

Are you excited about going back on tour?

I’m excited, but I’m also nervous. It’s a long time to be away from home, and these days I don’t find that so easy. But apart from that, it ought to be good to get out and do what we do one more time, right?