Skip to content

Experiences / Moon / Game

Tycho

PlayHow to play

Ride the Moonbus from Clavius Base to the TMA-1 dig in Tycho crater, the trip from 2001: A Space Odyssey, over the Moon’s real terrain, and land at the camp before dawn.

The ground is the real Moon, not an artist’s impression. Tycho’s rim, terraced walls and central peak, and the floor of Clavius, come from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has mapped the Moon from orbit since 2009: its laser altimeter, merged over Tycho and Clavius with stereo images from Japan’s SELENE.

Tycho is about 85 km across and nearly 5 km deep. It formed roughly 108 million years ago, recently enough that the bright rays of debris it threw out still streak across the Moon’s near side, easy to see from Earth at full Moon.

The Moonbus rides the elevator up into Clavius Base’s dome, and an autopilot flies the 482 km hop: a boost to just over 1 km/s, a coast more than 20 km high, and a braking burn. You take over 3 km above Tycho’s south rim and land on the camp’s pad.

How to play

W / S
Nose down / up
A / D
Yaw left / right
Q / E
Roll left / right
Space
Main engine
B
Reverse thrust
Shift / C
Thrust up / down
R
Toggle flight assist
L
Landing lights
F
Search light
Drag / Scroll
Look around / zoom
V / double-click
Reset the view
Esc
Pause
Enter
Skip the autopilot
Go deeper: The data ▾

The ground is simulated from actual NASA data. Over Tycho and Clavius the heights are SLDEM2015, which merges the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter with the Terrain Camera on Japan’s SELENE (Kaguya), at about 59 m a pixel; elsewhere they are LOLA’s, at about 340 m a pixel, over a 700 × 700 km patch. The surface imagery comes from the orbiter’s Wide Angle Camera (LROC WAC).

The game adds generated relief and surface detail (hummocks, small craters, texture) on top. The big landforms are real; the close-up texture is invented.

Go deeper: Before dawn ▾

In the film the Moonbus arrives at night, before the Sun has reached the dig. Here the Sun is about 1° below the horizon at Tycho, rising in the east: the crater floor is dark, and only the highest ground, the rim’s crest, catches the light. Earth hangs about 45° up over the camp, a little east of north, a fat crescent about 40 % lit.

Go deeper: The crater ▾

Tycho’s central peak rises about 2 km above the crater floor. It formed in seconds, as rock rebounded after the impact the way water jumps up after a stone drops in.

The crater is named after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), whose careful naked-eye measurements of the planets let Johannes Kepler show that orbits are ellipses.

Go deeper: TMA-1 and Clavius Base ▾

There is no monolith in Tycho and no base in Clavius. In the novel and the film, TMA-1 (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One) is dug up in the crater Tycho, and neither gives a position, so both sites here are chosen to match what the film shows: the dig on a flat stretch of Tycho’s floor in shadow, with the sunlit rim in view, and the base on the floor of Clavius.

The base, the camp and the dig are the site author’s models after the film’s sets: the shored pit 36.6 × 18.3 × 7.5 m, and the prop slab 3.28 m tall, 1.35 m wide and 0.20 m thick (not the novel’s 1 : 4 : 9).

Sources & credits