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.
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