LONDON — From Twitter music quizzes to running the London marathon on a treadmill, Tim Peake has turned much of his time on the International Space Station (ISS) into a bit of a reality show.

While he's no doubt getting through the 265 experiments he's supposed to have on his To Do list, he seems to be more focussed on talking to his fans than getting serious work done.

Today, though, he's set to pull something really impressive off - controlling a robot on another planet.

He's taking the controls of a rover on Earth remotely from the ISS, guiding the device around from some 400 km away.

The endeavour is part of ESA's Meteron (or (Multipurpose End-To-end Robotics Operations Network) project, which is preparing for future human-robotic missions to the Moon and Mars.

The Meteron project aims to "test operations, communications and robotic control strategies," the ESA says. "Operational considerations such as which tasks are robotic and which human, and what data are needed to support the monitoring and control of assets, will feed directly into plans for future exploration initiatives and the design of mission systems."

The rover, named Bridget, is stationed in a simulation of the landscape of Mars at the glamorous location of the Airbus Mars Yard in Stevenage in the UK.

Day & night on a simulated Mars. Rovers ready and waiting as #Meteron team checks delay-tolerant "space internet" pic.twitter.com/kxewAar8rF — ESA Operations (@esaoperations) April 29, 2016

During the course of the mission, Peake will guide it across the sand, avoiding obstacles, into a dark cave to identify a number of targets which will be marked by fluorescent markers.

While he's communicating with it from the ISS, other centres in Germany and Brussels will be involved remotely too.

He'll face a number of challenges, including keeping himself steady as the space station orbits at 27,000 km per hour and dealing with communications delays.

On Friday morning, tests were taking place ahead of the mission on the simulated landscape in Stevenage.

First part of today's #Meteron test: Brian the rover starts autonomous traverse of simulated Mars landscape pic.twitter.com/bOoj4Y4STh — ESA Operations (@esaoperations) April 29, 2016

A practise rover, Brian, was going over the terrain first.

How Brian rover sees its Mars terrain. Calculations of hazards based on cameras. It moves 2 m at a time. #meteron pic.twitter.com/7N7RUZli1Q — ESA Operations (@esaoperations) April 29, 2016

You can watch a live stream of Tim Peake controlling the rover from 2:30 p.m. UK time and follow all the action on ESA's Twitter account.