A Kashmiri student, Saniya Mehraj, studying in Guru Nanak Dev University recently participated in an asteroid search campaign conducted by NASA and IASC.
“Our team has done eight preliminary discoveries by finding eight asteroids for NASA,” Saniya informed Greater Kashmir in her email. The Asteroid Search Campaign concluded on March 24.
Saniya is the member of the asteroid search campaign team and has been labelled as the citizen scientist of NASA as well.
“I want to highlight this in our daily Greater Kashmir to encourage our students to take part in such activities. This can be an encouragement to our students who have been confined to their curriculums,” she said.
Notably, the members of the SciRox, a student science club of Guru Nanak Dev University, completed eight detections under a citizen science project in collaboration with the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) and Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded project.
Participating teams received these image sets through the IASC website and analysed them at their homes using the software Astrometrica to search for asteroids.