Scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will join hands with Vedic scholars to explore mysteries of ancient Indian cosmology at a Vedic Planetarium about 100 km from Kolkata, once the initiative of Alfred Brush Ford, scion of the United States automobile giant Ford, bears fruit.
Planned at Mayapur, an ancient seat of Vaishnavism and global headquarters of the International Society for Krishna
Consciousness, the plantarium forms part of a Rs 283-crore economic initiative by Ford, an ISKCON devotee.
Ford's company, ABF International, will promote the project along with a village industries park and a tourism
hospitality complex at Mayapur visited by lakhs of tourists each year from India and abroad.
"This will be unique project showcasing the scientific evidence on ancient consmological descriptions of space. We
have conducted a series of research and found that the distance between planets, as mentioned in Vedic cosmology, are
profoundly accurate with the findings of modern studies,'' said ABF International senior vice-president Alister Taylor.
Recalling that Mayapur was a famous seat of scientific and cultural learning in medieval Bengal, he said, "through
our reasearch, we realised that something very interesting (cosmological studies) was happening here."
"At the planetarium's research centre, we will have NASA scientists explaining the contributions of vedic cosmology to
the study of today's space science. There will be regular symposia on the subject by astro-physicists," Taylor added.