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Guest Editorial |
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Unleashing the Creative Imagination of Children |
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Dear Friends
I am glad to interact with my young friends through the editorial of Honey Bee newsletter, which promotes creativity among children.
Recently, I gave away the awards at Shankar’s International Children’s Competition at New Delhi. There I found the creative imagination of a 13 year old girl named Aardhra Krishna on how the earth’s civilization will look like around 3000 AD. In her imagination, the citizens are forced to migrate to Mars and have made Mars the home to a flourishing civilization. This advanced man made civilization, suddenly comes under threat created by nature in the form of an asteroid of Jupiter. The asteroid somehow loses its elliptical orbit and is headed towards Mars and Mars faces danger of annihilation. The scientists on Mars come up with a very innovative plan of a barrage of nuclear cannons to attack the oncoming asteroid. The bombardment destroys the asteroid. The dawn of the year 3000 witnesses the Martian civilization surviving the challenge of nature by an innovative scientific application. What a wonderful scientific and technological thinking of the young mind? When I was admiring this imagination of the young student, a real time space experiment was taking place with scientists of our generation giving this imagination, a natural event.
Combating Asteroids in reality
On 4th July 2005, an important event took place in space. That was the impact of the NASA spacecraft called ‘Deep Impact’ smashing into a comet called Tempel-I. The impact was enough to create a football stadium sized crater with a depth of a 14 storey building. The spacecraft was navigated through a ground control system by an Indian, Shyam Bhaskaran. The ‘Deep Impact’ travelled 431 million kms in 172 days. After escaping from the earth orbit, it intercepted the comet at a straight distance from earth at 134 million km. The comet was orbiting around the Sun every five and half years. What a marvelous feat in space exploration!
This event is an important milestone to develop standardized technique for combating asteroids which may hit the earth in future. One such large asteroid (1950 AD) is predicted with certain probability to hit the earth on March 16, 2880 A D. It is estimated now that the head on collision would damage one third of the earth. Like the “Deep Impact” many spacecrafts will be required to be sent with high energy material particles to divert or break the asteroid to move it out of the dangerous orbit. I am sure, the seeds of knowledge and imagination in young minds of our generation will enable our future generations to handle this oncoming challenge successfully.
I have always been campaigning for an education system that will trigger the creativity in children. I am sure, ‘Honey Bee’ under the able guidance of Prof. Anil Kumar Gupta will be an effective tool towards this end.
My best wishes to the entire team of Honey Bee and its valued young readers.
Dr A P J Abdul Kalam
Honourable President of India |
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| Volume No. |
Honey Bee, 16(3):3, 2005 |
