HOUSTON, TX. A Trinity High School group has been selected as a NASA App Development Challenge (ADC) Top Team and spent the last week with NASA engineers in Houston.
Team Spaghetti is made up of Carmelo Kniska and Ben Lohmann, juniors Lucas Kniska and Ethan Tomlinson, and sophomore Marcos Kniska were in Houston from April 15 through 18, showing off the app they created and meeting with industry leaders, NASA engineers, and astronauts.
“They interviewed us, and the interview must have gone well because then we were selected as one of the five teams across the country to go to the Johnson Space Center in Houston,” Carmelo Kniska said.
They developed an app that is basically a video game that allows astronauts to train for the Artemis mission to return to the Moon. The team took more than a month to accumulate the data, plot the points, and make the app user-friendly.
“Based on the data that we got from satellites, which is a bunch of numbers and different data points,” Kniska said. “We actually turned it into a model of the moon so we can see what different parts of the South Pole of the Moon look like.”
According to information from NASA, the first crewed landing near the lunar South Pole is planned for September 2026. The app developed by Team Spaghetti helps visualize one of 13 Artemis landing regions and displays navigation and communication data that could be used in future planning and training for the Artemis program.
“For the upcoming Artemis mission, they’re going to the South Pole of the Moon, and we need to be able to model that,” Kniska said.
Kniska said the professionals at NASA were very welcoming and provided
“They saw it as a privilege to see our app. They were very excited and motivating,” Kniska said.