Do you how big is the Angry Birds franchise? It's so big that now Angry Birds is going to be literally out of this world. The Angry Birds have their work cut out of them. They have not only been destroying those poor little pigs on a valentine's day and every other major holiday, but now they are being launched in the outer space too. Well, seems like the green pigs across the cosmos need to start looking for places to hide.

Rovio's popular 'Angry Birds Space'

Rovio will launch its popular game Angry Birds Space only after March 22, 2012 to the final frontier in partnership with NASA and National Geographic.

Earlier today, Rovio released the following preview video for Angry Birds Space, the game sequel that's scheduled for liftoff on March 22. In the video, NASA's Don Pettit demonstrates the flinging of an angry bird. In zero gravity. Aboard the International Space Station. Its equal parts cool and surreal.

As Angry Birds fans will know, Angry Birds Space is the latest iteration of the hugely popular multi-platform game but this time round has a physics approach, and obviously takes place in outer space and thus makes use of gravitational forces to beat them pesky green pigs. Well, Professor Rhett Allain looks at the physics approach, in his science blog on wired.com.

The physics behind Angry Birds Space

Rhett Allain wonders if the moons exert gravitational forces on the birds, what would that be like? The usual model for the gravitational interaction between two masses looks like this:

This says that if you have two masses (m1 and m2) and G is the gravitational constant, there will be a gravitational force pulling them together. If the vector r is from the center of the moon to the other mass, the force will be in the opposite direction (so towards the moon). Also, the magnitude of this force will increase the closer the centers of the object get to each other.

In the video footage Don Pettit says that there is a NASA satellite available that you can click on to learn more about space, whilst each green pig inhabited planet is surrounded by a gravitational orbit with the Angry Birds outside that field, and if you fire a bird that doesn't hit the gravitational orbit it will just shoot off into space, but if you fire into the gravitational field the trajectory of your bird will curve and hopefully destroy the pigs.

It seems interesting. Obviously this represents a fairly major change in Angry Birds gameplay dynamics. Whether it's for better or worse will be revealed on March 22, when the game arrives on all major platforms like android, iOS, Mac, and PC.

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