Every morning, Aditi Parthe sets off from her house at 9am for a 3.5 km hour-long walk to the Nigudaghar Zilla Parishad school in Pune’s Bhor taluka. At 5 pm, she walks the same route back to her maternal aunt’s hut. Her father and maternal uncle work as daily wage porters at Market Yard in Pune, while her mother lives with her elder brother at the father’s village.

No one in her house owns a smartphone, and there are no functional computers in the school. So when the 12-year-old became one of the 25 students selected for Pune Zilla Parishad’s (ZP) organised visit to NASA scheduled for later this year, joy was abundant.

In collaboration with the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), 75 ZP schools students from classes 6 and 7 were selected through three stages

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