Indian students discover 5 asteroids

Vaibhav Sapra and Sharanjeet Singh,both Class 12 students of Bal Bharti Public School,Pitampura,will get an opportunity to name the asteroid.

“The asteroid search campaign was conducted by NGO Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) along with the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC),an international educational outreach programme,” said SPACE Director C B Devgun.

Over 60 schools and organisations from across the country participated in the programme,where they were provided hands-on training to analyse images they receive by email,taken with the 24″ and 32″ telescopes at the Astronomical Research Institute (ARI) Observatory located at Charleston,US.

“The campaign,in its second year,provided an opportunity for the school students to collaborate and analyse data for asteroid hunting,” Devgun said.

Another breakthrough during the campaign was the discovery of a rare Trojan asteroid by two girls,Pragya and Aparajita,from Bal Bharati Public School,Rajinder Nager.

“Trojan is a rare asteroid which is in the orbit of Jupiter and difficult to spot. The discovery was remarkable as this was the first time in the history of this international campaign run by IASC that the students found a Trojan,” Devgun said.

Asteroids,sometimes called minor planets or planetoids,are small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun,especially in the inner Solar System. They are smaller than planets but larger than meteoroids.

The other students who discovered the asteroids are Chintan Betrabet and Umang Bhatia of Ryan International School,Sohna Road,Gurgaon,Trushit Makwana and Naval Koralkar from Coinstar,Institute of Chemical Engineering and Akshit Mathur and Kartik Ranjan from Navy Children School.

Last year also,a Delhi school had discovered a main belt asteroid for the first time in the history of Indian schools during the same program.