According to Kanoon General Directorate for Public Relations and International Affairs, 73 adolescents from various Kanoon centers in Lorestan, Isfahan, Kerman, Gilan, Qom, Tehran, Razavi Khorasan, Mazandaran, and West Azerbaijan participated in this movement.
Based on this news, Kanoon members from seven province including Lorestan (5 objects), Isfahan (4), Kerman (4), West Azerbaijan (3), Gilan (2), Qom (2), Tehran and Mazandaran (1 each) registered at 19th Campaign of Searching Asteroids.
Cooperating with Astronomy Magazine (Nojoum) that is the formal representative of holding the campaign of searching asteroids in Iran, Kanoon provided the teenagers interested in astronomy to participate in this campaign through computers and the Internet without having access to specialized tools.
Based on this, the organizers of this event held a webinar for the participants to get familiar with the software and the procedure of finding and registering asteroids, how to use the software called Astrometrica to analyze the images during the campaign and correcting the possible software mistakes which they may come across during the event.
During one-month period, several workshops were held for the teenagers to get familiar with Astrometrica software, to analyze the scientific data, and to study the images. The outcome of these endeavors was registering 21 celestial objects by groups from various provinces.
Recognizing asteroids are important to study and to calculate the movements of other celestial objects. Another interesting point is that asteroids contain expensive minerals. Today, the discussion of their exploitation has received much attention.
The asteroid search campaign is organized by the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC) and Hardin-Simmons University in cooperation with Pan-STARSS Observatory of the United States of America and with the support of the Citizen Science Department of the NASA Space Agency, and every year more than 500 volunteer groups from 80 countries participate in this program.
The goal of this program is getting help from the interested to recognize and to determine the location of asteroids and objects close to the earth discovered previously, also discovering new ones. Asteroids may be perilous in case they get close to the earth.
It is reminded that the strategy of this campaign was determined by the efforts of the General Directorate of Education and Research and Kanoon.