Gaze at the red landscape of Mars through your Xbox 360

Nasa’s ‘Curiosity’ space robot will (if everything goes according to plan) be landing on Mars over the weekend. If you want to indulge in a bit of Mars-watching but find the effort of leaving the warm, embracing glow of your Xbox 360 a bit too much to contemplate, then perhaps you’ll consider combining those two activities.

Xbox Live will be streaming the “final moments before landing” from Nasa’s own TV channel, so you can see for yourself if Curiosity makes it safely to the surface.

The special Xbox Live ‘Mars Rover’ section of the dashboard also has stuff like a quiz and engineering factoids to keep you entertained. There’s a free Mars Rover Landing game too, but sadly it appears to be Kinect only so I can’t really comment on what that’s like. A bit like Lunar Lander, hopefully.