We may someday learn that Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus is a comfortable home for microbial life swimming in subsurface oceans. But it already makes a great par 5.
The Cassini imaging team used the Saturn-orbiting spacecraft’s stunning images as the backdrop to Golf Sector 6, an adorably geeky flash game that lets you play golf on 13 of the gas giant’s moons.
“The whole point is to give people the sense of being along for the ride,” said imaging team leader Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Not just to convey the science, but to allow people that visceral enjoyment of seeing how beautiful and alien things are out there.”
The game mechanics are simple: You play a tiny human golfer standing on the craggy surface of one of Saturn’s largest moons, while the great ringed planet floats slowly by in the background. To hit the ball, click the golfer and drag a green line to aim and swing (the length of the line determines how hard you hit). The hole — or in this case, crater — is marked with a little red flag.
The physics is also simple, and mostly realistic. Each planet has a different gravity determined by its size and density. The ball’s trajectory follows Newton’s laws of motion. The creators cheated just a little: They assumed the moons were all spherical, and they sped up the timescale by a factor of 250. With realistic timescales, it would take hours for the ball to make it around the moons once.
Oh, and the sound effects. In space, no one can hear your golf club make a light saber noise.
Image: A screenshot taken shortly after this reporter’s ball was zapped by Mimas’s Death Star crater. Credit Lisa Grossman/Wired.com.
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