The two students named Radhika Lakhani and VaidehiVekariya both are studying in 10th Grade and were working on a project when they discovered this Aestroid which is changing its orbits and slowly moving towards earth. They named it HLV2514.
The girls belong to Surat and were participating in Space India and NASA Project. This campaign gives a chance to the students to analyze the images taken by a telescope which is at the University of Hawaii.
Space India has congratulated the girls for this new invention. And also wrote on their twitter handle saying “DISCOVERY ALERT! We are proud to announce VaidehiVekariyaSanjaybhai and Radhika Lakhani Prafulbhai, tow students of P.P. Savani Chaitanya Vidya Sankul (CBSE) from Surat with the help of SPACE-AIASC discovered a new Asteroid which is a Near-Earth Object named HLV2514.
Both of them discovered that the Asteroid is currently near Mars but is about to come near earth after millions of years.
IASC (International Astronomical Search Collaboration) Director J. Patrick Miller had steadfast through an email to SPACE India stating, “In the last campaign, your team reported HLV2514 as a new asteroid. It is, in fact, a NEO (near-earth object). This NEO is near the planet Mars and over time (~10^6 years), it will become an earth crossing asteroid.”
The super talented girls had discovered in June. Similar to the other objects HLV2514 is found through Pan-STARRS (The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System).
Pan-STARRS is one of the platforms that keeps track of the moving objects in the sky also keeping the astrometry and photometry of the objects that have been already detected.
"We started the project in June and we sent back our analysis a few weeks ago to NASA. On July 23, they sent us an email confirming that we had identified a near-Earth object," stated Vekariya.
"Asteroids are taken very seriously by NASA. Since this asteroid is changing its orbit it has become news," said Dwivedi. She also added stating “I look forward to... when we will get a chance to name the asteroid.”
