Moonwalker: NASA App Development Challenge

A simulation for exploration and analysis of the lunar South Pole created for the 2021 NASA App Development Challenge

In collaboration with: Uday Vidyadharan, Aarav Agarwal, Jason Liu, Aditya Dutt, Reva Amritkar

We were tasked with creating a simulation of the South Pole of the moon given a dataset of the moon’s surface. We chose the Unity game engine as many of my own favorite games used it; this required me to learn C#, as I was responsible for the simulation logic, UI, and graphics. Understanding the math and physics behind 3D games was very challenging, especially with the short timeframe that we had to complete the app. Because of this, many bugs were fixed with trial and error, fine-tuning the parameters until the simulation behaved well. In addition, processing the large 4-million-line data file into a piece of coherent terrain took many weeks, requiring me to dissect every step of the process to see had gone wrong. This was a very rewarding app to create as it helped me understand and appreciate the math and code that goes into games that emulate the real world.

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