Hi James,

There certainly are a lot of video games that are set in outer space. I remember playing a Star Wars video game a long time ago (in a galaxy, far, far away) where I had to fly a spaceship though a rotating asteroid with a hole in it. Now, that was really hard!

I don't know of any video games about astronomy for your XBox, Wii, or PlayStation at home, but NASA has made a few games that you can play online for free. One of the games is called Photon Pile-up - http://spaceplace.jpl.nas...x/photon/index.shtml In this game, you use the arrow keys to gather photons of the same color to make an image from the GALEX spacecraft.

There are also some other astronomy related games here - http://spaceplace.jpl.nas.../en/kids/games.shtml

Kris

Hi James,

I don't know of anyone from NASA planning to develop video games about astronomy for XBox, Wii, or Playstation. I think that it is probably easier for NASA and scientists working at Universities to make free games that you can play on the Internet. I think it would be really cool if someone did make astronomy games for them, though!

I remember a scientist giving a conference presentation a while back on MHD models of the magnetosphere saying that they actually ran their simulation on an XBox. It turns out that you can install a version of Linux (an operating system a lot of scientists like) on an Xbox and use it like a normal computer.

Kris