Pragyan, the techno-managerial college festival of NIT Trichy in association with Nakshatra, the official astronomy and science club of NIT Trichy takes immense pleasure in presenting our offerings for the World Space Week. The World Space Week is a week-long celebration of all things space; a week of exciting events and competitions with lucrative prizes, and a series of guest lectures by eminent personalities from the worlds of aerospace, physics, and astronomy.
Commemorating this week-long celebration of the vast expanses of space – what we’ve discovered and what we’re yet to observe – is a series of intriguing events with prizes worth over INR 40K at stake. The first of many events is Cosmic Canvas, a poster making event where one is supposed to design creative and stellar looking posters based on the themes and prompts specified. The next is a mind-boggling event where an intriguing rare catastrophic event will be shared on various social media handles of Pragyan. Called “What If?”, participants are expected to send their own theories on what would be the aftermath and its implications on human civilization.
These will be followed by Space Labyrinth, a fun-filled puzzle solving event. Participants will be required to answer a required number of questions that are based on space-related movies, astronomical events, book names, theories, astronomical terms, planets, stars, etc. The letters in these answers correspond to the password of an online streaming account, which is the prize for the event. Finally, the flagship event of Space Week, called Space Riddler, is set to take place spanning the entire week. It will be a series of challenges involving astronomical knowledge, posted for the participants whose task will be to find the answers using clues scattered across videos, the internet, and the respective social media handles in order to emerge victorious. The challenges involve solving analytic riddles; decrypting special codes and site surfing.
These events will be interspersed with three guest lectures. The first to address will be Dr. B. N. Suresh, the chancellor of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), Thiruvananthapuram, on the 4th of October 2020. Dr. B. N. Suresh is a leading Aerospace scientist and the former director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC). The next guest lecture will be delivered by V. R. Lalithambika, the head of India’s most ambitious space missions – Gaganyaan at ISRO, on the 10th of October. She earlier served as the deputy director at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre. The last to take the virtual dais, but by no means whatsoever the least will be David Reitze on the 18th of October. David Reitze is a laser physicist and a professor of physics at the University of Florida. He is also the Director of the LIGO laboratory and will conclude the series of guest lectures.
With the opportunity to gain immense knowledge on space and a much-appreciated perspective into astronomy and the academia of space, along with lucrative prizes upon winning events and competitions, our iteration of the World Space Week takes great delight in taking you along with it in its journey through space.
