Chennai: Two school students make preliminary asteroid discovery!

Two Chennai students might just be making history! Giridhar Sundaram and Jerix James of St John’s International Residential School, Chennai, have made two preliminary asteroid discoveries. The excited 12th standard students tell dna that it’s due to teamwork that they managed this feat.

After a workshop in their school conducted by SPACE, they were selected for the All India Asteroid Search Campaign 2015. The two students spent four hours after school poring over n-number of images and ended up making the preliminary discovery.

Explains Giridhar, who has a long-standing interest in astro-physics, “The first stage is preliminary discovery and then it moves to provisional discovery. Once that happens it goes to naming of the asteroids. We’ll name it after our school!”

Jerix James says prior to this, they’ve made a documentary on black holes, warm holes and white holes. The two spent a lot of time reading Stephen Hawking and tell dna that one person they missed meeting was Dr APJ Abdul Kalam.

Both students want to head to IIT and while Giridhar wants to build supercomputers for space research, Jerix wants to study computers and astrophysics. “We want to thank our Senior Principal – Dr R Kishore Kumar, Principal – Elizabeth Edwin and Vice Principal – Reny James for their support,” they state.

SPACE has been working on promoting astronomy and science in India and works with schools across the country in this endeavour.