3 Iit-bombay students get ASI recognition

MUMBAI: Three students of the Indian Institute of Technologybombay (IIT-B), who had last year discovered the closest asteroid to have crossed the Earth without touching it, have been recognised by the Astronomical Society of India (ASI).

Kritti Sharma, Kunal Deshmukh and Harsh Kumar received special mention under the ‘New Discovery Award 2020’ from ASI. In August last year, the students discovered an Suvsized asteroid that soared barely 2,950 km above the surface of the Earth. Named ‘2020 QG’, this was then the closest known asteroid to fly by the planet without impacting it.

On August 16, 2020, the students discovered this object just hours after it passed by the Earth using data from the robotic Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in California.

“It encourages us to continue our work in the field,” said Sharma, a 21-year-old hailing from Panchkula in Haryana.

“Students at the IIT-B scanned images for candidate asteroids in near-real-time as they are taken by ZTF and consequently allowed fast identification of asteroids such as 2020 QG. Fast identification is essential so that other telescopes around the world can perform follow-up observations to determine the orbit of asteroid,” said Thomas Prince, Ira S Bowen, professor of physics; Allen VC Davis and Lenabelle Davis, leadership chair, Keck Institute for Space Studies; Jet Propulsion Laboratory, senior research scientist and director, WM Keck Institute for Space Studies at Caltech.

IIT-B director Subhasis Chaudhuri said, “The trio routinely uses the GROWTH-INDIA telescope to verify asteroid candidates found in sky surveys, and report the results to the Minor Planet Centre of the International Astronomical Union.”