Sachin Bahmba, chairman and managing director of Science Popularisation Association of Communicators (SPACE), said Shourya Chambial and Gaurav Patib of Amity International School in New Delhi, and Balachandra Routhu and Ayush Gupta of Gurgaon's Ryan International School have made the country proud with their discovery of asteroids.
The discovery has been confirmed by the International Scientific Community and the asteroids provisionally named as "2013 LS28" and "2013 PR".
The students used exclusive data to look at specific parts of the sky and with the help of a complex procedure called 'Astrometrica', tracked objects by looking at the images of the sky provided by telescopes based in the U.S. to see which of the objects moving over time could be a possible asteroid.
The discoveries were made as part of the "All Indian Asteroid Search Campaign (AIASC)" programme conducted between April and August this year by SPACE and the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC).
AIASC was started by SPACE in 2010 in India aimed at increasing love for science, astronomy and research among school students.
Besides the two asteroids, 12 preliminary discoveries, two Near-Earth Objects (NEO) confirmation and 262 NEO observations were also done during the AIASC's phase III.
IASC is an international educational outreach programme which includes Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley and Global Hands-on-Universe Association and other International organisations that conduct programmes enabling students to be involved in hands-on, real time astronomy.
Using images taken of the sky in the night with the 24" and 32" telescopes at the Astronomical Research Institute (ARI) Observatory in U.S., the programme allowed students to sift through data to make original discoveries of Main Belt asteroids and vital observations that contribute to the NASA Near-Earth Object (NEO) Programme at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Near-Earth Objects are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighbourhood.
-- BERNAMA
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