HOUSTON, TX. — A group of students at Morgantown-based Trinity High School is looking to put to good use what they learned during a visit last week to NASA in Houston.
The students were there because they were selected as a NASA App Development Challenge Top Team. That recognition includes a week of activities at NASA including speaking with engineers.
The Trinity team, called Team Spaghetti, got the show off the app it created.
“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,” senior Carmelo Kniska said.
The team consists of seniors Kniska and Ben Lohmann, juniors Lucas Kniska and Ethan Tomlinson and Trinity sophomore Marcos Kniska.
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 advice.
“They saw it as a privilege to see our app. They were very excited and motivating,” Kniska said.