NASA's “Tour of Asteroid Bennu” Selected for Siggraph Film Festival | Hacker News Reader

NASA's “Tour of Asteroid Bennu” Selected for Siggraph Film Festival

nasa.gov

73 pointsArtWomb17 comments

Fascinating stuff. There nice trajectory animations on wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRIS-REx

From wikipedia:

> Such asteroids are considered "primitive", having undergone little geological change from their time of formation. In particular, Bennu was selected because of the availability of pristine carbonaceous material, a key element in organic molecules necessary for life as well as representative of matter from before the formation of Earth. Organic molecules, such as amino acids, have previously been found in meteorite and comet samples, indicating that some ingredients necessary for life can be naturally synthesized in outer space.

I love the style of the video combined with the narrative. Bennu is small and the narrator talks mainly about the mythological background of the names the scientist chose. This makes sense, but also indicates some lack of noteworthy things to mention about Bennu directly. Maybe it is due to the much bigger size of our moon, that the according video from NASA contains much more "actual" information about the object: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16822289

It would have been cool if they'd release the 3d model, and then it could be put in some sort of an interactive demo.

Procedural generation of realistic looking asteroids would make a nice graphics challenge. Lots of collisions in deep space, so you get those alien geometries with plenty of concavities ;)

they have released various 3d models at different resolutions, although I am not aware of a web based interactive version.

see: https://www.asteroidmission.org/updated-bennu-shape-model-3d... and

https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2632-3338/page/Shape_Mode...

with data hosted by the PDS at:

https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/pds/pds4/orex/orex_spice/...

Thanks!

It seems extracting a 3d model to be easily integrated with a program like Unity from the BDS files will not be trivial, and the 3d model as asteroidmission.org is relatively low-poly.

Nevertheless, it's pretty nice of them to release these.

a NASA video which uses feet as measurement unit

The worst part is we understand the concept of meters. A meter is very roughly the size of a yard. When a youtube vide says "100 meters or 328 feet", that really doesn't help.

I can visual 10 meters because I can visualize 10 yards. I understand the rough size of 100 meters because I know how big a football field is. I know how big two meters is because it's (again very roughly) the size of a person.

In the context of these types of videos the 9% difference is size from yard to meter makes absolutely no difference.

So just gimme the darn meters.

> The worst part is we understand the concept of meters. A meter is very roughly the size of a yard. When a youtube vide says "100 meters or 328 feet", that really doesn't help.

> I can visual 10 meters because I can visualize 10 yards. I understand the rough size of 100 meters because I know how big a football field is. I know how big two meters is because it's (again very roughly) the size of a person.

While I think pretty much every American knows what a yard is, as a practical matter I think people almost never use it. IMHO, it totally makes sense for NASA to ignore it in some video, because people have about 1000x more familiarity with feet for estimation and visualization.

And for intermediate lengths (like your 100 meters), it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to use yards to help someone convert into "football fields" when you could just give a comparison to football fields directly.

I appreciate your opinion. But even as an American I understand 2, 10, and 100 meters just fine. And that is really my point.

> I appreciate your opinion. But even as an American I understand 2, 10, and 100 meters just fine. And that is really my point.

I guess my point is that you may be an outlier, and in mass communication, NASA should have an eye towards targeting the masses [1].

[1] And given it's an American government agency, by masses I mean American masses, not metric-using global masses.

I was reading some old engineering textbooks (from the 50s) and they used imperial units. It was actually pretty nice since I think in terms of those units.

Edit: also, if you are designing anything structural in the US your loads are probably going to be in pounds unless you convert them to kilograms first, so if you use metric you're going to be doing a conversion anyways.

Odd this won any kind of award. The nonsense mythology made it one of NASA's worst videos of late in my opinion, but I guess that appeals to the non-science type unfortunately.

If you don't like things named after mythology, then space is perhaps not the place for you.

Good luck trying to leave it... ;-)

I don't care them naming things after things. Things need a name and mythology is a great dictionary of a random assortment of unique words. However the names mean nothing in regards to the science. They're just mnemonics. Explaining the mythology in a science video is completely irrelevant.

I don't know if I would call the SIGGRAPH audience the non-science type :D Also this is not an award but a showcase of short videos which are in some measure remarkable from the computer graphics or art perspective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com