Alongside cultural heavyweights such as Disney's "Encanto" and Warner Brothers' "The Batman," a short film created at Goddard shares the screen next week at a festival honoring standout works of computer animated storytelling.

"A Web Around Asteroid Bennu" highlights the tricky navigation it took for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to collect a sample from asteroid Bennu in 2020. Produced at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the video will show in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Aug. 8 in the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference's Electronic Theater, a qualifying venue for Academy Award consideration.

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 exiting orbit. The various segments of this web-like flight path were highlighted in full by data visualizer Kel Elkins, of NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio at Goddard.

"I started working with the trajectory data in 2015," Elkins said. "And when you first see an image 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.

Despite signs of wear, the intrepid spacecraft is about to start an exciting new chapter of its mission as it climbs a Martian mountain.

Ten years ago today, a jetpack lowered NASA's Curiosity rover onto the Red Planet, beginning the SUV-size explorer's pursuit of evidence that, billions of years ago, Mars had the conditions needed to support microscopic life.

South Korea joined the stampede to the moon Thursday with the launch of a lunar orbiter that will scout out future landing spots.