At the exhibition at Fergusson College on Saturday. (Express Photo by Ashish Kale)Written by Sadaf Inamdar
THE Astro Club of Fergusson College started its ‘Annual Poster Exhibition’ on Saturday. The theme of the exhibition, which ends on Monday, is ‘space exploration’, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as well as the Apollo 11 mission.
The exhibition covers topics such as ‘solar missions’, ‘to infinity and beyond’, ‘rocket propulsion’, and ‘lunar missions’, among others. Among the exhibits was that of Aditya Pandya, a first year BSc student, who built a mobile application based on augmented reality that showed seven rovers on different extraterrestrial bodies.
Advait Joshi, a first year student, said, “We hope events like these can attract people to basic sciences. We must encourage critical and independent thinking through exhibitions, projects and practicals from school itself.”
Speaking about the conception and purpose behind the club, Dr R V Dabhade, head of the Physics department, said, “Founded in 1998, Astro Club is a student-centric group that holds various programmes annually. The vision for this exhibition is to encourage curiosity and spread awareness about astronomy and astrophysics, among others. All efforts to organise events and seminars are taken by our students and we merely guide them along the way.”
At the exhibition, participants followed updates of the Chandrayaan-2 mission. “Irrespective of the outcome, it is a tremendous milestone in the history of ISRO and what we have achieved is no mean feat. The sheer scale and grandeur of this mission was very inspiring and such scientific achievements fuel inquisitiveness among students.
Such is the nature of space exploration, it is hard, sometimes brutally so,” said a student.
