TheSpaceGame — Design Your Route To Jupiter

An anonymous reader writes "The Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency is celebrating World Space Week (4-10 October 2010) with the release of 'The Space Game,' an online game for interplanetary trajectory design. The Space Game is an online crowdsourcing experiment where you are given the role of a mission designer to seek the best path to travel through space. The interactive game, coded in HTML5, challenges the players to devise fuel-efficient trajectories to various bodies of the Solar System via a user-friendly interface. The aim of the experiment is get people from all ages and backgrounds to come up with better strategies that can help improve the effectiveness of the current computer algorithms. As part of the events organized worldwide for Space Week, the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant. The best scores by 10 October will be displayed on the Advanced Concepts Team website and the three best designs will also receive some ESA prizes."

Am I missing something?

[imsabbel]

I mean, anything beyond jupiter would be a challenge. But jupiter itself? Hohmann transfer orbit, maybe with a sling around mars (would give very very low boost in deltaV, so not worth the launch window constrains IRL but ok for this)...

While we're on the topic... Orbiter

[seanthenerd]

Check out Orbiter [ucl.ac.uk] - without a doubt the most realistic (and incredible) space flight simulator around. My little brother has basically taught himself orbital mechanics using Orbiter and online tutorials for the game (if you can call it that!) The real deal - Hohmann transfer orbits and spaceflight mechanics-type concepts I'd never heard of.

When I saw "the space game", I thought for sure they were talking about Orbiter. If "designing your own route to Jupiter" is something you're interested in, do yourself a favour and check it out.

Dumbed-down GTOC

[Zoxed]

Although I work in the Space Industry I am not a Rocket Scientist but it is my understanding that this is *not* a purely computer solvable problem and is explained on the GTOC website: http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/mad/op/GTOC/indexII.htm [esa.int]

Re:Two Launches Necessary

[Issarlk]

It's the ESA, not NASA ; you'll need a dozen more launches.