Bennu 3-D Authors to Speak in London

When: Sunday, July 31, 6:30 p.m. UTC+1

Where: The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, and streaming online

Join the Natural History Museum for an enlightening evening as Professor Dante Lauretta, Sir Brian May, and the museum’s researcher Professor Sara Russell as they give an insider’s overview of the ground-breaking OSIRIS-REx mission. Hear all about what Dante and Brian discovered during their recent collaborative study of Bennu– Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid— and hear from Sara about how her team is preparing to analyze the sample. The authors will also share projections of captivating stereoscopic 3-D images of Bennu that became a part of the successful effort to find a safe landing site for the mission. The three will come together for the talk “Analysing Asteroids: From Bennu back to Base.”

Click here to learn more about online viewing options. Tickets are required for online viewing and cost £ 5.50, or about $7.00.

Lauretta and May will share thrilling 3-D imagery that provided vital information for the current OSIRIS-REx mission. In addition, Natural History Museum researcher Professor Sara Russell will share how her team are preparing to analyze the returned sample to unlock the secrets it holds. She’ll be delving into how analysis of it could help reveal not only how planets are formed but how life as we know it began.

Bennu 3-D: Anatomy of an Asteroid is the result of a unique collaboration between OSIRIS-REx mission leader Dante Lauretta and Brian May’s London Stereoscopic Company. Lauretta’s colleagues include Carina Bennett, Kenneth Coles, and Cat Wolner, as well as Brian May and Claudia Manzoni, who became part of the ultimately successful effort to find a safe landing site for sampling. The text details the data collected by the mission so far, and the stereo images have been meticulously created by Manzoni and May from original images collected by the OSIRIS-REx cameras.

Bennu, named for the ancient Egyptian phoenix, was the chosen destination of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s premier mission of asteroid exploration, launched in 2016. Study of the asteroid is important in safeguarding the future of planet Earth, but Bennu is also a time capsule from the dawn of our Solar System, holding secrets over four-and-a-half billion years old about the origin of life and Earth as a habitable planet.