School pupil tells Nasa it has a problem
An A-level pupil from Yorkshire has corrected Nasa’s scientific findings with little more than a laptop, a copy of Microsoft Excel and a sharp eye for mathematical absurdity.
Miles Soloman, 17, was trawling through a vast set of data from radiation detectors on board the International Space Station (ISS) when he spotted an impossible reading that cropped up repeatedly.
The teenager, who had downloaded the figures through a physics outreach programme run by the Institute for Research in Schools, said that he had alerted the space agency to the anomaly, which was now being fixed.
The Timepix experiment on the ISS involves using five chips to pick up the various kinds of highenergy sub-atomic particles that whizz around the universe at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
Scientists are worried about the toll these particles could take on the bodies of astronauts during long periods of exposure such as a journey to Mars.
Miles, who attends Tapton school in Sheffield, said that some of the detectors had registered radiation with a very small amount of negative energy, which was out of the question.
‘‘The first thing I thought was that you can’t have negative energy,’’ he told the World at One programme on BBC Radio 4.
‘‘Then we realised that this was an error. We emailed Nasa - even now that sounds quite cool - and said, ‘We’ve found these minus ones, do you know anything about them?’ . . . I’m not trying to say I’m better than them because obviously I’m not. They’re Nasa. I want to work with them and learn from them, and them possibly learn from me, even.’’
Lawrence Pinsky, one of the lead scientists in the radiation project, said Nasa was aware that the detectors’ 65,000 pixels, each of which can pick up a single particle, were very occasionally reading minus one, a mathematically impossible value, but did not realise it was happening every day until Miles pointed it out. He said the system would be fixed during a planned upgrade.