Space quizzes, astronaut selfie points, live experiments, colourful charts, and demonstrations made up the National Space Science Exhibition at the basement exhibition area of Science City on Wednesday.
Throughout the day, the space science exhibition was crowded with school students and their teachers. A.S. Kiran Kumar of ISRO inaugurated the exhibition on Wednesday. It will be open to the public till December 11.
Science institutes and science education establishments from across the country have set up 16 booths at the fair, an outreach programme undertaken by the participating establishments.
The participants include the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India (CESS), IISER Calcutta, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO, Eastern Region), ISRO Centre, ISRO Dehradun, S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Presidency University, University of Calcutta, St Xavier’s College and Ashoka University.
The most popular booth was IISER’s where kids thronged to see how mechanical energy was being converted to electrical energy with the use of a spring and a couple of magnets.
The plasma globe was the most intriguing object for students and the globe had light pink lights emanating from it. Explaining the phenomenon, an IISER student said: “A clear glass container is filled with a mixture of various noble gases with a high voltage electrode in the centre of the container. When voltage is applied, plasma is formed. Plasma filaments extend from the inner electrode to the outer glass insulator giving the appearance of multiple constant beams of coloured light.”
“The sun is the biggest source of plasma,” said a student and it often dumps a high amount of plasma, plasma flares or coronal mass ejections into space, which causes geomagnetic storms that recently destroyed Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellites.
“The earth having a stable atmosphere due to its magnetic field repels these plasma flares. But at the poles, the magnetic fields are weakest and one sees a manifestation of the plasma flares as aurora borealis,” explained the student.
At the far end of the basement, a space quiz for the school students was on. At Isro’s booth, a queue had formed to take selfies at the astronaut selfie point.
“I have brought my son here,” said Paramita Chakladar who has travelled all the way from Baruipur. “I had heard that there was going to be a science exhibition so I got my son who studies in Class IV of Don Bosco School here to get a bit of learning outside school texts,” she said.