Yes, you can drive on Mars online, free in a browser, but the options differ in how much you steer. Mars Rally Championship, a free browser rally game, is listed first because it is ours: you steer a fictional rally rover live under Mars gravity, 3.72 m/s², on sculpted terrain. On merit, NASA's Experience Curiosity lets you click a spot and watch Curiosity drive there over ground rebuilt from rover and orbiter images, NASA Space Place's Explore Mars has you program the rover's moves, and Explore with Perseverance and Mars Trek let you look and fly, not drive.
In-game screenshot: Stage 1, The Eight, at night, seen by the replay's drone camera; you steer the rover live, over sculpted terrain, not a real place.
- Steer live under Mars physics, free in a browser: Mars Rally Championship (ours, listed first).
- Drive the real rover over real ground: Experience Curiosity. Click or tap a spot, and Curiosity drives there.
- Learn how rovers are really commanded: Explore Mars: A Mars Rover Game, from NASA Space Place.
- See where Perseverance has actually been: Explore with Perseverance.
- Fly over the whole planet: NASA Mars Trek.
- Steer live over real Mars sites, as a download: Red Rover.
Can you actually drive on Mars online? Four levels of control
"Drive on Mars" means four different things online, and a game's title rarely says which. From most steering to least:
- Steer live: your controls move the vehicle as you press them.
- Click a destination: you pick a spot and the rover drives itself there.
- Program a route: you queue commands, then watch them play out.
- Look or fly: you move a camera, not a vehicle.
The ladder matters because real rover drivers work closer to the middle rungs than the top one: commands take minutes to reach Mars, so a drive is planned on Earth and carried out by the rover alone. Our guide to Mars rover simulator games explains that command cycle.
Diagram: the four levels as timelines of your input against the vehicle's motion; a real rover drive, planned on Earth, is closer to the middle two.
Mars driving games compared
Mars Rally Championship is first because it is ours; the rest run from the most steering to the least, with the two downloads last.
Method: each experience was checked against its NASA or JPL page, store listing or press coverage for controls, ground, Mars physics, browser support and cost; where a source does not say, the table says not confirmed. Experience Curiosity dates from 2015 and Explore with Perseverance from 2021; both are still listed on NASA's sites, but try them before you rely on them. Mars Rally Championship's details come from its own code. Last checked: October 2026.
| Experience | How you control it | The ground | Mars physics | In a browser | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mars Rally Championship Play | Steer live: keyboard, gamepad or touch | Terrain sculpted to Martian morphologies, not a real place | Yes: 3.72 m/s² gravity, thin air, regolith grip | Yes, no account | Free, no ads |
| Experience Curiosity (2015) | Click or tap a spot and Curiosity drives there; move its arm, mast and antenna | The Pahrump Hills area of Gale Crater, rebuilt from Curiosity's and orbiter images | Not confirmed | Yes, WebGL | Free |
| Explore Mars: A Mars Rover Game | Program the route as commands, then watch | Not confirmed | Not confirmed | Yes | Free |
| Explore with Perseverance (2021) | Drag the camera around the rover at its stops; no driving | Jezero Crater, rebuilt mostly from the rover's own images | None, you do not drive | Yes | Free |
| NASA Mars Trek (2015) | Fly a viewpoint over the map | Global Mars maps from spacecraft | None, no vehicle | Yes | Free |
| Red Rover (2018, download) | Steer live | Nine real sites about 5 km across, from orbiter images | Not confirmed | No, Windows, VR optional | Paid |
| BeamNG.drive (download) | Steer live | Earth maps | Gravity can be set to Mars's value | No, Windows and Linux | $24.99 on Steam (US) |
Read the table as a trade: in a browser, real ground comes with clicking or looking, and live steering comes with sculpted ground.
Diagram: in a browser, real ground comes with looking, flying or clicking, and live steering with sculpted ground; only Red Rover, a download, steers live over real sites.
Browser Mars driving games, ranked by how much you steer
Five of the seven experiences in the table are browser tools, and only one of those five lets you steer live.
Mars Rally Championship: steer live, under Mars physics
Our game, listed first for that reason. This is Mars Rally Championship's own site; everything below it is ranked by how much you steer.
Mars Rally Championship is a free 3D rally game that runs in a browser tab with no download, no install, no account and no ads. You drive a fictional pressurized Mars rally rover, a pickup-truck-sized 3,000 kg machine rather than a science rover, with a keyboard, a gamepad or, on screens under 1,200 px, touch in landscape. The physics steps at a fixed 60 Hz and reads your controls every step, so the steering is live.
Gravity is 3.72 m/s², 38% of Earth's. The air is 0.020 kg/m³, about 1.6% of Earth's, so downforce is impossible at any speed. Regolith offers about 3.1 m/s² of grip to share between braking, cornering and throttle, and a stop from 100 km/h takes about 125 m and 9 s, roughly 2.4 times the 52 m the same tires need on Earth gravel.
What it is not: a rover simulator. There is no signal delay, no autonomy and no science instrument, and a top speed near 240 km/h is nothing like a real rover's pace. The terrain is sculpted, not a real place. There is one vehicle and three timed stages; a new pilot's first timed stage is Stage 1, The Eight, a 2,676 m loop driven at night, and free roam is a 2.5 km square with no timer, always at sunset. Up to eight pilots can race live, with no car-to-car collisions. If a slow machine stutters, the pause menu's QUALITY button steps the graphics down from HIGH.
Play free — no downloadExperience Curiosity: click a spot, and Curiosity drives there
Experience Curiosity is the closest a browser gets to driving the real rover. JPL built it as a free WebGL web app for the third anniversary of Curiosity's landing, in August 2015, rebuilding the Pahrump Hills area of Gale Crater from Curiosity's own images and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's.
In Free Drive you click or tap anywhere in the landscape and Curiosity drives there. Three presets are places where it captured well-known images, Rover Replay acts out a mission event you pick, and you can drag its arm, mast and antenna.
You choose where it goes; you do not steer, and whether it models Mars physics is not confirmed. The app dates from 2015 and its page lists old browsers, so open it on NASA's site and try it before planning around it.
NASA Space Place's Explore Mars: program the route
NASA Space Place's Explore Mars is a coding game. NASA's STEM page says you use programming skills to steer a rover to study Martian rocks: you send instructions that set out the route to a rock and earn points for each rock analyzed. That is closer to how real rovers are commanded than live steering is: a plan written in advance, then played out. It is aimed at younger players and has no live steering; no Mars physics is described, and its device support is not confirmed.
Explore with Perseverance: look around, no wheel
JPL released Explore with Perseverance in September 2021: a 3D model of the rover at several of its key stops in Jezero Crater, on a landscape built mostly from the rover's own images, with orbiter images added. It opened with seven stops, starting with the Octavia E. Butler Landing Site. At each one you drag a camera around the rover, view the images it took there and see the rocks it has sampled. You cannot drive; it is here because it shows where a real rover has actually driven.
NASA Mars Trek: fly the planet, not a rover
Mars Trek is one of NASA's Solar System Treks, a free web portal launched in August 2015 alongside Experience Curiosity. You fly a first-person viewpoint over the surface with the keyboard, and the portal adds maps with instrument overlays, measuring tools, 3D-printable topography and VR flyovers. It is a map you fly, not a vehicle you drive, so there is no physics to speak of.
Older Mars driving links: retired or unconfirmed
Two names turn up on older lists. Access Mars, a 2017 Google Creative Lab and JPL WebVR experiment, no longer works: Google's page says the experiment is no longer active. NASA's 2016 Mars Rover game, built with GAMEE, had you drive over rough terrain and use radar to hunt for underground water; it once played in a desktop browser, but its current availability could not be confirmed. If an old list recommends either, use Experience Curiosity or Explore with Perseverance instead.
Mars driving simulators to download, for comparison
Two downloads steer live where most browser options do not, and are here for comparison only. For paid rover games built around missions and survival, such as Take On Mars, Mars 2030 and Occupy Mars, see our Mars rover simulator games guide.
Red Rover: steer live over real Mars sites
Red Rover is a Mars driving simulator by indie developer Alan Chan, on Steam since June 2018 for Windows, with optional Oculus Rift VR and a non-VR mode. You drive a land rover over nine curated Mars sites, each roughly 5 km by 5 km and rendered from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's high-resolution camera images. There are no missions or high scores, but there are a day and night cycle and jump jets, which a real rover lacks. It is paid, a few dollars; how deep its physics goes is not confirmed.
BeamNG.drive: Earth cars under Mars gravity
BeamNG.drive can be bent into a Mars car simulator, but only partway. It is a paid soft-body driving sim, $24.99 on Steam in the US as of September 2026, for Windows and Linux. Its documentation says you can change the world's gravity at runtime from the Environment menu, so you can set 3.72 m/s². The slider changes gravity, not the air or the soil, and the maps are Earth's. There is no browser version; BeamNG in a browser explains why.
Real ground, real physics or real operations: pick what you want to be real
Real ground means rebuilt from images of a real place: Experience Curiosity, Explore with Perseverance and Mars Trek in a browser, Red Rover as a download.
Real physics is Mars Rally Championship's claim: 3.72 m/s² gravity, air at 0.020 kg/m³, and a 100 km/h stop in about 125 m and 9 s. What driving on Mars would be like works through those numbers, and the braking distance calculator runs the stop at any speed. The terrain is the part that is not real.
In-game screenshot: braking hard at night on Stage 1; with 3.72 m/s² of gravity, a stop from 100 km/h takes about 125 m and 9 s on regolith.
Real operations means working like a rover team: plan the drive, send it, wait. Explore Mars's command queue is that in miniature.
Where to try this
To steer live now, or to read further:
- Play Mars Rally Championship, or go straight to free roam.
- Stage 1, The Eight, a new pilot's first timed stage.
- Mars rover simulator games, for NASA's tools and paid rover games.
- What driving on Mars would be like, for the physics.
- The Mars braking distance calculator, for stops at any speed.