The goal is to get as many points as possible by landing in as many places as you can, without running out of fuel.
Although anyone can quickly learn to play the game, the advantage will go to those that develop an intuitive feel for orbital motion and can make sense of the data provided.
You begin landed on a rough spherical asteroid. Its surface is divided up into 360 zones.
Each zone is worth points based on how many degrees it is from the starting point.
So the most valuable zone is worth 180 points because it is 180 degrees away.
You can only get points for a zone once. Additional landings in that zone receive 0 points. As you pass over a zone, it tells you the point value under the heading "U".
Any time you land back on the starting point, on the red launch pad, you get refueled to 100%.
You must land within about a degree of "upright" or it will register as a crash and the game will end.
The 5 buttons on the bottom, from left to right are:
If you are on a computer with a keyboard, the following keys emulate the buttons:
The data provided are:
Tangential speed
Radial speed
Speed
Distance from center of asteroid (meters)
Angular speed of the spaceship about its own axis.
Orientation of the spaceship with respect to the local surface. (90° is upright)
Semi-major axis
Eccentricity
Angular position
Fuel %
U (point value of zone you are over. U is used in Physics for potential energy. In this case, it stands for potential points. It will be 0 if you've already landed there)
Points
It's easy to get good at scoring 10s to low hundreds of points by hopping around the various zones near the starting position. But to master the game, you must learn how to insert the spacecraft into orbit around the asteroid. That way, you can coast fuel-free to the bottom of the asteroid where all the high-point zones are located.