The Hartselle Rotary Club honored the Hartselle High School award-winning Pre-Engineering Team Tuesday, Jan. 29 at its regular meeting at Sedona Steakhouse. The Pre-Engineering Team presented its ANGGRI BIRD project to the club. ANGGRI BIRD, an acronym for Analyzing the Native Geology of Ganymede as a Result of Intrusion By an Impactor to Receive Data, won the NASA/UAH Competition to Develop a Space Payload. The project’s objective was to develop and design an autonomous scientific payload for a UAH-designed spacecraft, determine the purpose of the payload, and understand the engineering design process.

The UAH mission was to send a lander to Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter’s moons, discovered by Simon Marius and Galileo Galilei in 1610. The ANGGRI BIRD objective was to enhance the UAH mission by providing a payload equipped with equipment to create a plume of dust from the surface of Ganymede and gather information about the geology through capturing and analyzing the dust.

The team consists of Engineering III class students: Jake White as project manager, Chris Brown as chief engineer, Michael Powell as engineering, Eli Bair as head marketing, Nick Watson as marketing, Colton Ord as head communications, Jack Holland as communications and Blake Springer as UAH POC. The engineering class is taught by Kim Pitman.

The group will present its project to NASA’s director of planetary science in Washington, D.C., during spring break in hopes to have its payload selected to fly on a real NASA mission.

Hartselle Mayor Don Hall presented the group with a certificate of honor at the rotary meeting recognizing the team for exhibiting “extraordinary technical skills, organizational ability and presentation expertise in competing with 27 other high school teams for project selection, by a panel of judges from NASA and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.”

The Rotary Club congratulated the team in the certificate saying, “Your accomplishment reflects highly on your team, the Hartselle school system and the entire community and serves to reassure that future science and technology is ‘in good hands.’ ”