In India, a program called “All India Asteroid Search Campaign” was recently launched in collaboration with NASA. In this context, two 14-year-old students discovered a brand new asteroid, explains an article in Vice on Tuesday, after the institution “Space India” announced it on social networks.
Provisionally baptized "HLV2514", this celestial object does not represent a threat to our planet, but specialists explain that it is a major scientific discovery.
DISCOVERY ALERT!
We are proud to announce VAIDEHI VEKARIYA SANJAYBHAI and RADHIKA LAKHANI PRAFULBHAI, two students of PP 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. pic.twitter.com/HXpOvrwxNY
Close to Mars
Vaidehi Vekariya and Radhika Lakhan are students in Surate, a city located in the state of Gujarat, in western India. They were able to make this discovery in June by analyzing images captured by the Pan-Starrs telescope in Hawaii. According to their observations, the asteroid, actually identified for the moment as an "near-Earth object", is currently close to Mars. It is expected to cross Earth's orbit within a million years.
From now on, NASA will try to definitively confirm its orbit, before renaming the celestial object with another name. For her part, one of the two students said she wanted to become an astronaut when she was older.
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