Two Delhi school boys discover a new asteroid

Wonders never cease to exist. Two Delhi students have discovered a new asteroid as part of a unique astronomy project connected to the US space agency NASA. Amanjot Singh and Sahil Wadhwa, both Class XII students of Ryan International School, discovered a main belt asteroid (2010 PO24) on Aug 6 as part of the All India Asteroid Search Campaign (AIASC). Asteroids are very small planet-like objects that generally go around the sun in orbits located between Mars and Jupiter.

“I am really excited about it,” Sahil said. “Every day we used to send our findings to scientists in NASA and they used to tell us if we were successful in discovering an asteroid, a near earth object or a second time confirmation of the asteroid.”

The campaign conducted between May 17 and June 30 and from July 1 to Aug 13, was introduced in India for the first time and about 30-45 schools were involved in it. The school students were involved in the project by the Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators (SPACE) along with the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC), an international educational outreach programme.

The students went through exclusive data files of the sky provided by the IASC using astronomical data analysis software. The data files had images of the sky taken in the night with 24-inch and 32-inch telescopes at the Astronomical Research Institute (ARI) Observatory in the US.

Three other students from Navrachana School in Vadodara have made a Virtual Impactor Observation (VIO) discovery of a Near Earth Object (NEO) discovered during the same programe July 19.