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ISS NASA Education United Kingdom

17-Year-Old Corrects NASA Mistake In Data From The ISS (bbc.com) 79

Posted by EditorDavid from the extra-credit dept.
"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"
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17-Year-Old Corrects NASA Mistake In Data From The ISS More

17-Year-Old Corrects NASA Mistake In Data From The ISS

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  • Can we get the kid to correct their climate data? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26, 2017 @02:44PM (#54113813)

    Un-"correct" it I mean.

  • Not just at NASA (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @03:03PM (#54113901)

    Interestingly, all of the comments up to this point have a negative reading (-1) as well.

  • How is this Newsworthy? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26, 2017 @03:27PM (#54114019)

    Many types of radiation sensor have an average count they pick up in their sampling window. This is then subtracted to get an reading which, on average, is zero but which for any given reading could be negative if the count fluctuates low when there is no particle incident. It might be that they had an issue with the pedestal fluctuating.

    All this guy did was look at a column in an Excel spreadsheet, saw that there were negative numbers for the energy and contacted NASA to ask about it. Has the standard of A' level science fallen so far in the UK that this is now newsworthy or is this just an indication of the appallingly low level of science at the BBC?

    • Mod parent up. Kudos to the kid for finding this, but it's just a measurement-calibration issue, not news.

    • I suspect it's as much a comment about the skillz at Nasa as it is about this kids abilities.

      The reason it's news is because of its incredible rarity. It's almost never that a British kid gets to do anything cool, let alone find something no one else did. We're a pretty small place, and we don't have a space agency of our own, so usually by the time we get to look at anything it's already been washed out by plenty of other people. As I say, it's as much comment about others as it is about us.

  • Everybody benefits... (Score:5, Informative)

    by retrosurf ( 570180 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @03:49PM (#54114105)

    Student saw an in-band indication that the detector was in a non-radiation reporting state, and asked NASA about it.

    NASA says, huh, that's weird. It's not supposed to happen that often. Hey kid, wanna do us a solid (in more ways than one)?

    Hell yes, says kid.

    BBC, realizing that story is too complicated, bowdlerizes title to get people to read it.

    Slashdot talks about something else entirely.

  • There are moments in every business (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    when a young and aspiring person notices something wrong, but doesn't realize that the reason grownups didn't bother looking into it is because they have more important shit to do. It's good if you can let the youngster fix it. It'll be a crappy fix, but who cares? Too bad if you have to do it yourself, and then come up with some stupid story about how noone ever tought this could be not functioning properly. Being young is awesome. It's easy to get the impression that you're a total badass and be happy bec

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Reaction on Slashdot: 50% jealous, 40% offtopic ranting, 10% insightful.

      Parent qualifies as "jealous". Sheesh, the boy noticed something NASA - by their own account - didn't. That doesn't make him a total badass, but it's more of a contribution than you or I have made. Give him some credit.

  • Well, that may not be entirely true. The Casimir effect and Hawking radiation are both potential examples of "negative energy". Hawking radiation is still entirely theoretical, and the few (I think maybe singular) experiment that actually measured Casimir forces (as described here [physicsworld.com] makes no mention of negative energy. And, of course, this experiment was not designed to detect anything like this; especially seeing as Hawking radiation would only be right outside the event horizon of a black hole.

    Harold Whi

    • Re:"But you cannot get negative energy" (Score:4, Informative)

      by habig ( 12787 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @04:56PM (#54114405) Homepage

      Well, that may not be entirely true. The Casimir effect and Hawking radiation are both potential examples of "negative energy".

      ... and the total potential+kinetic energy of a solar system. Or an atom. Energy is so often a sum game where negative energies happen all the time.

      But, that's not the case here. If an ADC-based sensor is reading a "negative" amount, it's either an error condition (as it sounds like here) or a bad calibration (pedestal subtraction).

      Kudos to the kid for noticing it! Thumbs down to the BBC writer for venturing into negative-energy land in two wrong senses at the same time.

  • It still doesn't explain why the best current measurements indicate that dark energy contributes 68.3% of the total energy in the present-day observable universe.

  • ? not the only time (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    the NSIDC has a great website with automated analysis of satellite data on how much ice is in polar regions
    https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

    I look at this every day or so, and about a year ago, noticed the trend line was odd
    I emailed them, hey, maybe you should look at the data
    A day or two later, they put up a notice: sattelite sensor malfunction, data collection suspended

    co incidence ?

  • Would be my first thought when I see negative energy readings. If a sensor produces a signal when no radiation hits it, then the average level of this signal is substracted. Since such a signal normally has a noise it will result in some negative values. Then it would not be an error.
    I don't see any details on what kind of sensor this is though, or what kind of energy it measures. So I can't tell if it is that.
    • This becomes an issue actually if it is not planned for, if the used data type does not support negative values. I have seen quite expensive devices that just set the values zero, which messes up the average of values.

  • Well, maybe (Score:5, Funny)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @05:36PM (#54114639) Journal

    "But you cannot get negative energy.."

    Based on my experience with my first wife, I disagree. That bitch could suck the happiness out of a room at a hundred paces.

  • Given that "child helps pros" news often turns to be false, I'd wait for some confirmation or a follow-up from NASA.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      So you're prone to negative readings of stories like these?

    • I'll posit a different theory.

      NASA deliberately publishes erroneous data in its Institute for Research in Schools program. Sits back and waits for some smart kid to detect the bad data. Offer kid job (sometime down the track).

  • Yeah continue giving access to your select few then when the government says they aren't going to pick winners anymore, decry the horrible state science will fall to now that everyone is on a less inequal footing.

  • Just think of it. He's now famous for correcting NASA! I'd bet he's drowning in pussy right now.

  • Is it just me or is there a bit of a contradiction? From TFA: "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." So he noticed something no-one else had....then in the very next line state that NASA was aware just they believed it wasn't as common as he pointed out. So NASA did know about the negative readings but didn't quite know the extent of the mistake. I gue

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