IIT Bombay Duo Discovers Closest Asteroid to Fly by Earth

The third-year Mechanical Engineering student Kritti Sharma and final year Metallurgy and Materials Science student Kunal Deshmukh from IIT Bombay have discovered the closest asteroid to fly by the Earth.

Earlier in 2011, Catalina Sky Survey also discovered an asteroid that flew 5,500 km above the Earth's surface, whereas the newly discovered asteroid, traveled 2,950km above the Earth's surface. The asteroid was roughly the size of an SUV and hence did not affect the planet Earth.

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Kritti Sharma expressed her pride over the discovery saying, "We were sure those were asteroids, but we had no idea that it would be marked in history!" After analyzing data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), California, Deshmukh said that the data looked just like other asteroids seen so far.

The ZTF team reported the finding by the IIT Bombay duo to the International Astronomical Union Minister Planet Centre, which later confirmed their findings.

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What is ZTF?

ZTF i.e. Zwicky Transient Facility discovers young supernovae nightly and searches for rare and exotic transients. ZTF is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is supported by many other collaborators like IPAC, Caltech, University of Maryland, and others.

Kritti had always been passionate about astronomy and most importantly about observational astronomy, which drew her interest in this project.

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The proud Professor of IIT Bombay, Varun Bhalerao reported that Kunal had been working on the project for some time and Kritti had joined him from this semester onwards, however, Sharma was first trained before putting her hands in the project.

The team will now be studying these objects with the robotics GROWTH-India telescope at Hanle, Ladakh.

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