Two 14-year-old sisters from India have achieved a remarkable feat through a NASA-partnered program. Vekariya and Radhika Lakhani identified a new near-Earth asteroid currently orbiting Mars. Rest assured, it poses no threat to our planet for approximately a million years.
Hailing from Gujarat, India, sisters Vekariya and Radhika Lakhani participate in a collaborative initiative between Space India and NASA. This program enables students to examine images from the Pan-STARRS telescope, situated atop Hawaii's Haleakalā volcano on Maui.
In June 2020, the sisters detected an previously unknown near-Earth asteroid now orbiting Mars. Temporarily designated HLV2514 pending NASA's orbit confirmation—which may take years—the discovery was verified by Space India via a tweet on July 25, 2020.
While HLV2514 is on a trajectory toward Earth, experts confirm it presents no risk, as its closest approach won't occur for about a million years. NASA has hailed this as a significant find.
“We started the project in June and returned 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,” Vekariya Lakhani shared in a CNN interview. She aspires to become an astronaut.
Operational since December 2008 and managed by the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS telescope has a storied history. It discovered comet C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) in 2011, Earth's quasi-satellite (469219) Kamoʻoalewa in 2016, and notably 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017, the first confirmed interstellar object, possibly a fragment of a super-Earth.
