Famed Queen guitarist and citizen astronomer Brian May collaborated with NASA's asteroid mission OSIRIS-REx, helping scientists find a suitable landing spot on the space rock that turned out to be completely different from what they had expected and designed their mission for.

May, who famously completed his PhD in astronomy in 2007 after a more than 30-year hiatus enforced by Queen's rise to fame in the early 1970s, sat down with Space.com to discuss his collaboration with the groundbreaking mission, NASA's first attempt to collect a piece of space rock and deliver it to Earth.

"Bennu: 3-D Anatomy of an Asteroid", authored by May and OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, is available in the U.S.from University of Arizona Press and in the U.K. from London Stereoscopic Company