IIT Madras students work on satellite to pre-empt quakes

Many of them loved the challenge. Says S Varsha, a third year electrical engineering student who is designing the analogue electronics for the particle detector: "I am able to get practical experience at level difficult in a course." If the students succeed in the project, they might end up making good contributions to science as well. 

In the last few decades, scientists have made progress in predicting all natural disasters except earthquakes. Earthquakes can be predicted only when they begin. Before an earthquake happens, the ground is believed to emit low frequency and ultra-low frequency waves. These waves go up and interact with the Van Allen belt, a layer of charged particles more than 1,000 km above the earth. 

This is supposed to lead to a sudden precipitation of particles from the belt, which the IITM students are trying to detect using a satellite below. But it is not a proven theory. In 2012, US space agency NASA launched two satellites right into the Van Allen belt to study this phenomenon; it is supposed to have found particle precipitations four days before an earthquake. 

However, NASA scientists also found longer-term associations between particle precipitation and earthquakes, and so do not consider it an accurate method of prediction yet.