Drive a Huge Telescope in this Space Observatory Game

Move over Build with Chrome; there's a new glorioulsy geeky game to satisfy your browser-based time wasting needs, and it involves more serious construction work than Lego bricks.

Chajnantor: Race Against Time was built by European Southern Observatory (ESO) engineer Juan Antonio Marrero Hernández, and is set in the Chajnantor Observatory in Chile. Your mission: drive around in one of the special transporter trucks to place the last huge, universe-observing antenna in its correct position in the array.

The ESO announced the game on its site: “Have you ever wanted to try driving one of the huge ALMA transporters? If you answered “yes” to that question, then there is good news!”

Marrero Hernández told me he's long been interested in games and took the opportunity of an open day at ESO to make something simple to amuse children. "I have always been crazy about making games, applications, etc. since I had my first spectrum48k 30 years ago," he wrote in an email. "So every time I see the opportunity I try to spend some time on it."

Using the direction buttons on your computer keyboard, you have to drive a transporter carrying an ALMA antenna to its correct position in the array. ALMA stands for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a group of huge radio telescopes in the Atacama desert. It was inaugurated last year, and consists of fifty antennas like those shown in the game, each 12 metres across. Imaging by the array is hoped to give insight into the early universe. "It will enable transformational research into the physics of the cold Universe, probe the first stars and galaxies, and directly image the formation of planets," the ESO explains.

The game makes a fun, if very basic introduction. You can play it in-browser via Unity player, or download it for Windows, and don’t worry—it’s not too difficult. The idea is to drive your transporter on a road, following direction signs to the spot you need to drop the antenna. You can race against the clock, or against other players. And yes, you can crash into the other antennas.

It’s kind of like a much (much)-simplified Mario Kart, but the overly dramatic music lets you know this is serious business. “The last ALMA antenna needs to be urgently placed,” the game challenges you. “Are you the expert driver that the project needs?”

There's currently only one "mission" option, but Marrero Hernández has hopes to develop it further, depending on how much free time he has. "It is a very simple and stupid semigame which I would like to enlarge with more missions and stuff," he said, adding, "but as any free task (I am not paid for that) it takes a bit of motivation to continue so let’s see what happens in the future."

Though hardly a great feat of game design—it’ll waste all of about five minutes of your time—it’s a cool way of getting people interested in the more earthbound side of space exploration. And it's nice to know engineers at the largest astronomy project on the ground get some time off too.