Daksh Malik, a ninth-grade student at Shiv Nadar School in Noida, has received recognition from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for a ‘provisional asteroid discovery,’ allowing him to choose a permanent name for the asteroid.
“I’ve been fascinated with space…I used to watch all these documentaries on National Geographic about planets and the solar system. This is like a dream come true,” The Print quoted Malik as saying.
Malik received mail about International Astronomical Search Collaboration in 2022
For a year and a half, Malik and two of his classmates had been searching for asteroids as part of the International Asteroid Discovery Project (IADP). They received this chance in 2022, when their school’s astronomy club sent an email regarding the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC).
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Through the IASC, a citizen science initiative linked to NASA, individuals – including students – globally can ‘identify’ asteroids for the American space organization.
IADP, organized by STEM & Space in collaboration with IASC, attracts more than 6,000 participants each year globally, though only a handful succeed in discovering new asteroids.
According to the IASC website, prior to Daksh, five other Indian students successfully identified a named asteroid.
In what Malik referred to as a ‘fun exercise,’ the trio of friends, similar to other participants, needed to download IASA’s datasets, adjust them using the Astronomica software, and then look for any celestial bodies that could potentially be asteroids.
Additionally, they needed to watch for any signs of motion in an object, while also verifying if the light produced by it stays within the threshold for asteroids.
“I felt like I was working at NASA,” Malik joked to the website.
He mentioned that NASA will spend 4-5 years conducting preliminary tests and finishing their verification for the asteroid, and only after that will he be able to name it.
