NASA Game Lets Players Recreate Mars Rover Landing

Downloadable on XBox

NASA has revealed a new video game that lets players experience Mars exploration first hand, a first for the U.S. space agency.

The video game, "Mars Rover Landing," is available for free in the Xbox Live Marketplace and Kinect Central as part of a NASA campaign to involve the public in Mars exploration, according to a statement released by NASA officials. Produced in collaboration with Microsoft, the video game uses the Kinect motion sensor on the Xbox 360 console.

The object of the game is to successfully navigate the seven-minute process of breaking through Mars' atmosphere, what mission engineers have dubbed "seven minutes of terror," and delicately land the car-sized rover, what the CS Monitor calls "the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission," on the planet's surface.