Web-Based Game for Psyche – Captain of the Spacecraft

INSTITUTION

Arizona State University (ASU)

CLASS

Iridium Class (2024 – 2025)

STUDENT TEAM

ACADEMIC GUIDANCE

Maria Elena Chavez Echeagaray (Professor)
Steven Osburn (Professor)
Xuanming Hu (Instructor for CSE 423/485)
Yonatan Rosenbloom (TA for CSE 423/485)
Qi Lin (Instructor for CSE 424/486)
Jagruth Arutla (TA for CSE 424/486)

Rona Oran (Magnetometry Investigation Scientist for the NASA Psyche mission)
James Richardson (Author for research paper)
Michael Shepard (Author for research paper)

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Our project is a NASA effort to bring space exploration to everyone by focusing on the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, which is found between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft, launched in October 2023, is set to arrive at Psyche in mid-2029 to study its composition and give us clues about the early solar system. We’ve created a web-based game that takes you through the mission from start to finish using simple 2D graphics. In the game, you’ll act as the spacecraft captain, solving challenges and answering quizzes about how the spacecraft’s tools work—such as the imagers, gamma ray/neutron spectrometer, magnetometers, and antennas—just like NASA scientists do. The game runs on both mouse and keyboard and is built with Unity and C++ so that people of all ages can easily learn and have fun with it.

Play the Game!

This work was created in partial fulfillment of the Arizona State University Capstone Course “CSE 485”. The work is a result of the Psyche Student Collaborations component of NASA’s Psyche Mission (https://psyche.ssl.berkeley.edu). “Psyche: A Journey to a Metal World” [Contract number NNM16AA09C] is part of the NASA Discovery Program mission to solar system targets. Trade names and trademarks of ASU and NASA are used in this work for identification only. Their usage does not constitute an official endorsement, either expressed or implied, by Arizona State University or National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of ASU or NASA.