Congratulations on Provisional Asteroid discoveries by students
Congratulates to our students on theirProvisionaldiscoveries ofasteroidsduring the April 2021 STEM & SpaceAsteroidSearch Campaign!
The meritorious student discoverers from your school are the following who were in 4 teams:
- Ishaan Chauhan
- Krishay Chadha and Raghav Garg
- Paarth Agnihotri, Manav Harsana, Swinzal Taneja
- Veer Mendiratta, Aarav Kathuria
This is a remarkable achievement for our students, which they have achieved with their diligence and hard work.
STEM & Space conducted a highly specialized monthlong project in May-June 2020, in collaboration with the international group International Astronomy Search Collaboration (IASC), affiliated with NASA.
Under this project, students were trained and guided by STEM & Space to look through real images from the Pan Starrs telescope in Hawaii, and search forasteroids. Many of the students foundasteroidswhich were listed as preliminary discoveries, and we are proud to share that 30 such discoveries by various schools under our campaign of these have now been confirmed as provisionalasteroiddiscoveries by the Minor Planet Catalog (MPC), and will be formally recorded.
Asteroiddiscoveries with provisional status are maintained in the MPC database for many years, until there have been a sufficient number of observations to fully determine the orbit. That process typically takes 6-10 years, at which point theasteroidis numbered and cataloged by the International Astronomical Union. Numberedasteroidscan be named by their citizen scientist discoverers.