The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft conducted a two-year reconnaissance and sample collection of asteroid Bennu, providing crucial data on the 500-meter-wide potentially hazardous space rock/debris pile. When OSIRIS-REx arrived on December 3, 2018, it needed complicated navigation and precise maneuvering to make the mission work.
Experts at NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio created a stunning visualization of the path the spacecraft took during its investigations. A short film called “A Web Around Asteroid Bennu” highlights the complexity of the mission, and the film is being screened at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, a festival that honors outstanding works of animated storytelling by computer
Other films at the festival include Disney’s “Encanto” and Warner Brothers’ “The Batman.”
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Data viewer Kel Elkins compiled the data for the movie, which shows the web-like flight path for OSIRIS-REx as well as the touch-and-go maneuver, or TAG, to collect the sample of the asteroid surface.
“I started working with 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.”
The video lasts about four minutes in total, showing the flight path around Bennu from start to finish in one continuous shot.
Screenshot of the OSIRIS-REx orbital path display.
“From a trajectory and navigation perspective, the team really did things that had never been done before in planetary exploration,” said Mike Moreau, assistant project manager for OSIRIS-REx at NASA Goddard . “We flew the spacecraft closer to this object than any other spacecraft before; we did maneuvers that were centimeters per second, or millimeters per second, in order to get the spacecraft exactly where it needed to be be and change its orbit.”
Taking their data visualization to the next level, Elkins and his colleagues plan to release a 360-degree version of “A Web Around Asteroid Bennu” that wraps the video around the viewer, for a interactive experience on VR headsets, mobile devices and online.
“As amazing as it is to see the trajectory in front of you in the original format, there’s something about putting the viewer in the middle and letting them look around you,” Elkins said. “You are in space and OSIRIS-REx is flying around you. We are very excited to be able to release this additional 360-degree view.”
This illustration shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft leaving the asteroid Bennu to begin its two-year journey back to Earth. Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona
OSIRIS-REx is currently returning to Earth and will drop a sample in the Utah desert in September 2023. With the sample recovered, the spacecraft has been given a new mission and will head to one of the most infamous asteroids of all, the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis for an 18-month study. The mission will be renamed OSIRIS-APEX, which is short for OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer.
Source: NASA
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