NASA puts its asteroid-moving mission into a video game

An asteroid might have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, but NASA is gonna make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to the Kerbals.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is teaming up with developer Squad to add a new mission to the studio’s spaceship-building simulator Kerbal Space Program. This new addition to the popular indie game will mirror NASA’s own Asteroid Redirect Mission, which is a three-part strategy to locate, land on, and move a space rock by 2022. NASA wants to study asteroids and prove that it can adjust their path if a large one is headed for Earth. It also wants to use Kerbal Space Program to increase the general understanding of science.