A 17-Year Old Student Pointed Out A Significant Error in NASA Data
The TimPix Project is a project which allows students from the UK to access data from the radiation detectors from the International Space Station (ISS) during Tim Peake’s six month stay there. The measurements are then sent back to earth on a regular basis, and were given to students in the form of a bunch of Excel spreadsheets to practice data analysis and study them in real world applications.
Miles Soloman, a 17 year old student from Tapton School in Sheffield, along with his fellow students, was working on the TimPix project when he noticed something odd once the data was sorted by energy levels. “I went straight to the bottom of the list, and went to the lowest bits of energy there were,” he said, “I noticed that where we should have no energy, where there was no radiation, it was actually showing -1. The first thing I thought was ‘Well you can’t have negative energy,’ and then we realised that this was an error.”
Realizing this, him and his physics teacher James O’Neill immediately sprang into action and emailed NASA.
As Soloman told BBC Radio, the researchers at NASA had replied that they were aware of this error, but they thought it had only occurred up to twice a year, when in reality, “What we actually found was that they were happening multiple times a day.”
“They thought they had corrected for this,” said physicist Lawrence Pinsky from the University of Houston. “The problem is that some of the algorithms which converted the raw data were slightly off, and therefore when they did the conversion, they wound up with a negative number.”
Source: Youtube, The Institute for Research in Schools
When asked by BBC World at One host Martha Kearney whether a 17 year old student pointing out a mistake in their data was embarrassing, Pinsky didn’t think it was. “It was appreciated more so than being embarrassing,” he said. “The idea that students get involved at a real level means that there’s an opportunity for them to find things like this.”
For Miles Soloman, this project has definitely given him inspiration to pursue a career in STEM in the future. He also cleared up that he wasn’t trying to outsmart NASA in anyway when he pointed out the data error. “I’m not trying to prove NASA wrong, I’m not trying to say I’m better, because obviously I’m not – they’re NASA,” he said. “I want to work with them and learn from them.”
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