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British teenager emails NASA to tell them their calculations are wrong

A British teenager has emailed NASA scientists to tell that their calculations are wrong – and the space agency thanked him.

A-Level student Miles Soloman found that radiation sensors on the International Space Station were recording ‘false data’ – and messaged a correction to NASA.

Mr Soloman spotted that when the Space Station’s sensors were not picking up radiation, they recorded a negative reading – and pointed out to his teacher that you cannot have ‘negative energy.’

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Mr Soloman, who studies at Tapton school in Sheffield, said it was ‘pretty cool’ to email the space agency.

Nasa is said to have ‘appreciated’ the student’s feedback – and scientists asked him to help them resolve the issue.

‘What we got given was a lot of spreadsheets, which is a lot more interesting than it sounds,’ Mr Soloman.

‘I went straight to the bottom of the list and I went for the lowest bits of energy there were,’ he said.

Mr Soloman’s teacher and head of physics, James O’Neill, said: ‘We were all discussing the data but he just suddenly perked up in one of the sessions and went “why does it say there’s -1 energy here?”‘