An Indian student has won a competition organised by NASA as Artemis Next-Gen STEM – Moon to Mars App Development Challenge.
Aryan Jain, who Is a part of the team that participated and won in the coding challenge, is a high school student at the SunCity School in Gurugram. The American space agency organises this competition once a year.
This year the Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) section of NASA required participants to develop an app to help in mission planning and exploration activities of the Lunar South Pole.
Jain is a part of “Team Unity.” Besides Jain, this team includes 6 other members who represent a joint team of 5 different global schools. The team is led by Whitney High School, USA. Many industry leaders and NASA leadership have invited the Team Unity members to virtually with them in February.
While participating in the competition, the members of Team Unity developed an app by using the cross-platform gaming engine Unity. They programmed it in C#. The app offers a mini-map. This mini-map would allow astronauts to see their position. It will help to measure the distance covered between the landing site and destination.
An option to choose between first-person perspective and third-person perspective is also available on the app. The app offers pathfinding, terrain textures, and 3D scenes. Accessible Lunar South Pole data was used by Team Unity to develop this app.
