UK Student Tells NASA How To Fix Its Experiment
UK schoolboy corrects NASA data error, BBC
“A-level student Miles Soloman found that radiation sensors on the International Space Station (ISS) were recording false data. The 17-year-old from Tapton school in Sheffield said it was “pretty cool” to email the space agency. The correction was said to be “appreciated” by Nasa, which invited him to help analyse the problem. “What we got given was a lot of spreadsheets, which is a lot more interesting than it sounds,” Miles told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme. 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. During UK astronaut Tim Peake’s stay on the station, detectors began recording the radiation levels on the ISS.”
TimPix Project
“In partnership with Professor Larry Pinsky at the University of Houston, and in collaboration with NASA, the Institute for Research in Schools is able to release data from the Timepix detectors on board the ISS and give students and teachers the opportunity to take part in this research.”
This is really good and excellent work. The issue was a radiation monitor, which occasionally glitched and reported a flux of -1 rather than zero. A smart student (by the US system, he’d be a high school junior, although the UK system uses different terms) had the opportunity to look at the data and knew a negative flux was physically impossible. The scientists involved were aware that this sort of glitch happened, but assumed it was rare and not worth fixing. Actually, it wasn’t all that rare, and if you do averages when analyzing the data, those -1 values pull down the average and create a systematic error. They were glad someone had noticed how common that glitch is, and are working on fixing it or filtering out the glitches.
All instruments have issues of this sort, especially flight instruments (which tend to be one-of-a-kind designs.) Fixing those problems is important, but it is hard to get scientists excited about tracking them down. You aren’t going to make a big discovery as a result; you are just cleaning up the data for others to use.
Having high school students looking at the data and identifying these sorts of issues is a fantastic solution. They learn to look at real data and how to tell the difference between instrument artifacts and valid measurements (which is a huge bonus for them, if they want to go into experimental science.) The scientists working on the instrument get people and eyes to find instrumental issues, almost for free and who are willing to find the bugs and glitches. That’s a win-win situation. If there are any high school students in Boulder interested in this sort of thing, you might want to contact me (F. Crary, at CU’s LASP laboratory.) I’ve got a list of similar issues.