Citizen Science Group of Silchar detected 18 asteroids

way2barak, Sept.19: ‘Astrogen,’ a Silchar-based citizen science group, detected 18 asteroids recently by participating in the International Asteroid Search Campaign. The group was led by Dr. Himadri Sekhar Das, Associate Professor, Assam University, Silchar. Eight members of that group participated in four campaigns which started on March 29, 2022, and ended on September 16, 2022.

The youngest participant was a school student, Oishee Jyoti, from Don Bosco School, Silchar who studies in Class VI. She detected two asteroids. Other members who discovered asteroids are Dr. Himadri Sekhar Das, Gulafsha Begom Choudhury, Tanusree Bhattacharya, Sanchali Nath Mazumder, Saikat Majumdar, Akashdeep Mohanta, and Sovan Acharya. They detected 4, 1, 6, 2, 2, 1, and 1 number of asteroids respectively. The other members of the group were Bhaskar Goswami, Anamika Paul, Saunak Bhattacharya, and Saptadeep Sen.

The most popular citizen science project around the world is the Asteroid Search Campaign which is organized by the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC). IASC is a citizen science program that provides high-quality astronomical data to citizen scientists worldwide. America’s space agency NASA and Pan-STARRS (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii) are the partners of this search campaign. This service is provided at no cost to citizen scientists!

Astrogen was established on March 28, 2022, in Silchar to popularize Astronomy among common people and to engage citizens and students of different institutions of Barak Valley in several citizen science projects. The objects which were detected by citizen scientists fall into the Preliminary Detections category. Later, the Minor Planet Center will verify the detected objects and announce the final report. It will take 3 to 5 years to confirm the asteroid’s orbit and consolidate any additional measurements of the object. Then, the objects will fall into the Provisional Detections category. To date, 10,190 objects were classified as Preliminary and 51 objects were classified as Provisional.