Credit: https://principia.org.uk/activity/timpix/

NASA has thanked a teenage student who noticed an error in International Space Station data. It’s a unexpected benefit of a schools research program.

The TimPix project involves schools getting access to radiation data collected from Timepix detectors on the ISS, with the name also being a nod to it having been collected during ESA astronaut Tim Peake’s time on board.

The project is mainly about students learning more about how radiation data can help researchers infer the effects of both the Sun and stars beyond our solar system, though there’s also the hope that the fresh perspective of students might throw up new ways of looking at data.

17-year-old Miles Soloman was working on the project at school. When viewing the data spreadsheets, he decided not to concentrate on the data showing the highest levels of radiation, but instead looked at the very end of the list at the low recordings. He noticed a large number of entries listing the energy level as “-1”.

It turns out this was data points where the detector had recorded no result but rather than a zero or blank reading, the system had marked it down as a negative.

Soloman contacted NASA, which said it was aware that the system could generate such an error, but was previously under the impression it happened at most a couple of times a year. In fact, Soloman had spotted it took place multiple times each day.

[Via: BBC]