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Kinect Game Lets You Land NASA’s New Rover on Mars

A new free Xbox game gives anyone the chance to steer through seven minutes of terror and attempt to safely land NASA’s newest rover, the Mars Science Laboratory.

MSL, which is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet the night of Aug. 5, is a car-sized nuclear-powered rover designed to search for signs of life on Mars, past or present. It is the largest robot that engineers can currently land on the Martian surface and its descent from space includes a complex list of events that have to happen perfectly to ensure success.

After entering the top of the Martian atmosphere, MSL will use its heat shield to slow down to slightly above Mach 2. It will then deploy the largest supersonic parachute ever used on an interplanetary mission to get to landing speed. Once the parachute is jettisoned, the spacecraft will fire up rockets and slow down even further. A UFO-like platform will gingerly lower the rover down on wires until, about 25 feet above the surface of Mars, MSL will be placed on the ground, hopefully ready to roll. Once it has brought its quarry to the ground, the platform will fly off and crash far from the rover to prevent any damage.

“This is the hardest NASA robotic mission ever attempted,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, during a JPL press conference on July 16.

In the game, now available at the Xbox Live Marketplace, players use the Kinect to take control of the spacecraft, moving their body to drive the rover as it descends to the Martian surface. People can attempt to pilot the rover’s shell through the top of the atmosphere, deploy the parachutes at the right time, and carefully lower the rover down on the sky crane.

Though players can crash the rover as often as they want, NASA officials will have to go through the events in real life fairly soon. The hair-raising seven-minute sequence has got engineers and scientists at JPL nervous. Any one of the events in the landing sequence has the potential to cause a fatal problem, said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA’s Mars exploration program.

But they are confident that they have checked and rechecked every system and the only thing left to do is wait and see if it all works as planned. Even after the seven minutes of terror, it could take five to 10 minutes before officials back on Earth know if the sequence worked because communications satellites around Mars might not be in the right configuration to beam back the news right away.

If you don’t have access to an Xbox or want to drive the rover around on the ground after your picture-perfect landing, NASA currently has a game in beta testing called Explore Mars: Curiosity that lets you take the helm of the robot once on the surface.

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Video: JPLnews/Youtube