“A British teenager has contacted scientists at NASA to point out an error in a set of their own data,” writes the BBC. An anonymous reader quotes their report.
A-level student Miles Soloman found that radiation sensors on the International Space Station (ISS) were recording false data… The correction was said to be “appreciated” by NASA, which invited him to help analyse the problem… The research was part of the TimPix project from the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS), which gives students across the UK the chance to work on data from the space station, looking for anomalies and patterns that might lead to further discoveries. What Miles had noticed was that when nothing hit the detector, a negative reading was being recorded. But you cannot get negative energy… It turned out that Miles had noticed something no-one else had — including the NASA experts. NASA said it was aware of the error, but believed it was only happening once or twice a year. Miles had found it was actually happening multiple times a day.
There’s a video of the student — and his teacher — describing the discovery, a story which Miles says his friends at high school listen to with “a mixture of jealousy and boredom”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
https://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discuss&id=10411443&smallembed=1