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School Students from India join global hunt for asteroids
SPACE and IASC, conducted by Patrick Miller from Hardin Simmons University in the US is offering Indian students a chance to add to NASA’s database of asteroids hurtling in space.
News Tags: SPACE, All India Asteroid Search Campaign, asteroid, Hardin Simmons
For the past 6 years, the country has seen several amateur astronomers and students make discoveries facilitated by city-based organisation SPACE under its educational outreach programme, the All India Asteroid Search Campaign (AIASC).
SPACE (under its AIASC for 2016), in collaboration with the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC), conducted by Patrick Miller from Hardin Simmons University in the US is offering Indian students a chance to add to NASA’s database of asteroids hurtling in space.
90 teams, with 2 participants from each team, have been selected for the programme from across the country. The programme begins on June 27 with two phases spread over till August 23,2016.
The purpose of the Asteroid Grand Challenge (AGC), a large-scale effort under NASA, is to motivate students and citizen scientists to identify and document asteroids in earth’s environment, assessing their threat to the planet and also study them.
Te first to discover an object from Asia in 2010, as a student in class XI, Amanjot Singh said “The experience was great and I got to learn a lot,” adding to which he said he was enthused by the experience and has now joined SPACE as an instructor.
Under the AIASC programme students and amateur astronomers get an opportunity to explore and study astronomy in a hands-on and detailed approach. The campaign stands as a platform for the participants to access astronomy images and interact with international students.
Image courtesy: cdn.ndtv.com