Eight high school juniors and seniors spent less than a month reconstructing the flight mechanics of an active lunar mission using nothing but publicly available data. The NASA SEES internship, run through the University of Texas Center for Space Research, placed them on the MATRIX team — tasked with modeling when a propellant-measurement technology called Modal Propellant Gauging could take reliable readings during the Intuitive Machines IM-3 mission, scheduled to land at Reiner Gamma on the Moon in 2027. The core technical challenge is genuinely hard: in microgravity, liquid fuel clings to tank walls instead of pooling at the bottom, making it impossible to measure propellant mass with conventional gauges. MPG, developed by mentor Dr. Kevin Crosby at Carthage College, uses acoustic response — essentially listening to how the tank vibrates — to estimate how much fuel remains. The method has flown on previous missions and is slated for demonstration on IM-3's Trinity lander. Because the IM-3 trajectory hasn't been published, the team wrote a reconstruction algorithm from IM-1 and IM-2 flight data sourced from JPL's Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF). They compared reconstructed flight paths against thrust-free motion models to isolate engine burns and estimate delta-v. They then ran computational fluid dynamics simulations to model fuel slosh inside the tanks and Monte Carlo simulations to predict the range of possible propellant states — tools that are standard in aerospace engineering but unusual for a high school team operating on a sub-month timeline. The analysis identified that MPG can take reliable readings during Lunar Orbit Insertion and Powered Descent burns, and sometimes during Descent Orbit Insertion. The spacecraft's starting mass was the dominant variable affecting gauging-window duration. The team also produced candidate 2027 launch windows and a landing-site distribution analysis for Reiner Gamma. The team then briefed the Intuitive Machines propulsion group directly, walking engineers through methodology and results. Their mentor's assessment was blunt: the work rivals advanced graduate students in the field. The students presented at the SEES Annual Symposium and the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium conference, with a presentation at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco scheduled for December 2026. The broader value here isn't the individual results — it's the pipeline design. SEES places 11th and 12th graders on real mission problems with real data, mentored by the people who built the technology. The propellant management problem the MATRIX team worked on connects directly to in-space refueling, fuel depots, and sustained lunar operations — capabilities NASA needs for Artemis and beyond. The program has been running for over a decade under cooperative agreement NNH15ZDA004C. What makes this generative rather than performative is the feedback loop: students produce analysis that actual mission engineers review and engage with. The work product feeds back into the mission ecosystem rather than existing solely as a credential for the students. That said, the program remains small — eight students per team — and the question of whether this model can scale without diluting quality is the obvious next challenge.
