December 3, 2024 - Seven budding computer scientists and engineers from Hill Country College Preparatory High School are preparing to submit their original application to NASA. Their work provides a flight path for the four-member crew of the Artemis II mission which will fly around the Moon.
Through NASA’s App Development Challenge (ADC), this HCCPHS team began the 10-week student challenge on October 2 and will complete its mission on December 11 with its video submission.
The HCCPHS team consists of Ty Fonseca, Breck Leon, Dyllon McCormick, Brennan McKee, Jackson Olivarez, Keshav Singh and Sara Ziegler. Each team member plays a vital role in the challenge from working on trajectory calculations and visualization to gathering the data and creating a storyboard for the video including a script, graphic design and images.
“These students are learning real-world applications with real-world data while interacting and engaging with NASA coders and engineers throughout this challenge with four live virtual events and weekly office hours,” says Rena Keinrath, computer science and cybersecurity teacher at HCCPHS.
“Furthermore, a challenge such as this one, broadens their horizons, gives them confidence and promotes our campus which encourages students to seek these opportunities.”
In fact, it was Singh who discovered the challenge and brought it to Keinrath’s attention and then began recruiting fellow students to participate.
“One of the biggest parts of this project is seeing how our work can actually help the Artemis mission,” says Singh. “We can easily get lost in the details, but one of the most exciting parts is the practical application. While we are ultimately competing and doing our best to win, the larger applications are always top of mind.”
Once all submissions are received, NASA scientists and engineers will review and select teams to be interviewed. From the interviews, top teams will be invited to an event at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The HCCPHS team believes that its strategy of focusing on the details will help it advance to the next level.
“We are really meticulous with the details,” says Singh. “We are creating our own formulas and systems, and we think that will really differentiate our submission.”
The ADC is a coding challenge in which NASA presents technical problems to middle and high school students seeking student contributions to deep space exploration missions. By responding to the ADC, students take part directly in the Artemis Generation endeavors to land American astronauts, including the first woman and first person of color on the Moon.
The high school team challenge is to create an application which displays the path of Artemis II by processing and visualizing all provided position and velocity data for the mission; utilizes color to represent the different phases of the mission (e.g. orbiting earth, traveling to the Moon, traveling to Earth), number of available antennas and resultant velocity vector; and utilizes the Link budget formula and the SCaN antennas data to display a prioritized list of antennas with line-of-sight access to Artemis II (e.g. least number of communication asset changes, or highest link budget).
Four astronauts will venture around the Moon on Artemis II, the first crewed mission on NASA's path to establishing a long-term presence on the Moon for science and exploration through Artemis. The 10-day flight will test NASA's foundational human deep space exploration capabilities, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, Orion spacecraft, for the first time with astronauts. Launch is expected to occur no earlier than September 2025.
The HCCPHS Falcons are no strangers to NASA challenges. Last spring, a proposed experiment from an engineering class of eight students was among only 60 in the nation to be chosen for a $1,500 grant by NASA’s TechRise Student challenge.
Photo Description
-A team of seven Hill Country College Preparatory High School students entered the NASA App Development Challenge, creating a flight path for the Artemis II mission. Pictured in back from left is Breck Leon, Ty Fonseca, Sara Ziegler and Brennan McKee; seated in front row from left is Jackson Olivarez, Keshav Singh and Dyllon McCormick.