NASA Goddard’s “Web Around Asteroid Bennu” will be screened at the SIGGRAPH Filmfest

Alongside cultural heavyweights like Disney’s Encanto and Warner Brothers’ The Batman, a short film created by Goddard will be screened next week at a festival recognizing outstanding work in computer-animated storytelling.

“A Web Around Asteroid Bennu” highlights the tricky navigation required for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to collect a sample from asteroid Bennu in 2020. The video was produced at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and will be shown in Vancouver, British Columbia, on August 8th at the Electronic Theater of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Conference, a qualifying venue for the Academy Awards.

OSIRIS-REx completed a series of complicated maneuvers around Bennu over the course of two and a half years before collecting its sample with a touch-and-go, or TAG, maneuver and deorbiting. The various segments of this web-like trajectory were fully highlighted by data visualizer Kel Elkins of NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio in Goddard.

“I started working with the trajectory data in 2015,” Elkins said. “And when you first see a picture of all the different maneuvers, it looks like a rat’s nest. But it was really exciting to see these complicated maneuvers in 3D space.”

“From a trajectory and navigation perspective, the team has really done things that have never been done before in planetary exploration,” said Mike Moreau, associate project manager for OSIRIS-REx at NASA Goddard. “We flew the spacecraft closer to this object than any spacecraft has flown before; we performed maneuvers that were centimeters per second or millimeters per second to get the spacecraft exactly where it should be and to change its orbit. “

The video runs for approximately four minutes in total and shows the trajectory around Bennu from start to finish in a single, continuous shot.

“We knew we wanted to make a big product for departure,” said Dan Gallagher, planetary science multimedia producer at NASA Goddard. “And it seemed like a natural adjustment to show the entire web from start to finish and release it at the point where we actually departed and returned to Earth.”

The concept is simple, but the journey from idea to end product required some precise science to execute effectively. What a viewer sees in this video is not just an imaginary drawing, but actual, illustrated data: “What makes the Scientific Visualization Studio a little different is that the elements in our visualizations are driven directly by mission data,” Elkins said. “I enjoy working on projects based on real scientific data and being able to convey that to people.”

“A Web Around Asteroid Bennu” is the latest in a series of Goddard productions to make it to the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater. Elkin and Gallagher’s “Tour of Asteroid Bennu” was shown there last year.

After back-to-back appearances from Goddard Planetary Science and the Scientific Visualization Studio, what’s next for Elkins and Gallagher?

“When I first spoke to Dan and said I was excited about how we got picked for the second track, Dan already started planning,” Elkins said. “He said, ‘Well, we’ve got to plan the third, we’ve got to get the hat-trick.'”

“Kel said he was surprised we were there two years in a row,” Gallagher said. “But I’m not surprised. Kel is fantastic. The SVS is fantastic. I think they deserve to compete with the best in Hollywood.”

This month, the team plans to release their next piece for OSIRIS-REx: a 360-degree version of A Web Around Asteroid Bennu that wraps the video around the viewer for an interactive experience on VR headsets, mobile devices and online.

“As amazing as it is to see the trajectory live in front of you, there’s something about putting the viewer in the center and letting them look around,” Elkins said. “You are in space and OSIRIS-REx is flying around you. We are very excited to release this additional 360-degree view.”