Nico Marquardt
Nico Marquardt is a German politician, non-executive director and consultant. At the age of 13, he became internationally known with his astronomy research work about the near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis.
Life
Early life
Nico Marquardt was born in Potsdam, Germany as the son of a Oberstleutnant and nurse.Education
He holds a Bachelor's degree in Digital Business, a Master's degree in Public Health and is currently pursuing a PhD in Global Health with a focus on the application of artificial intelligence to improve maternal health in low-resource settings.Astronomy
In April 2008, at the age of 13, he took part in the competition Jugend forscht with his research paper The Killer Asteroid 99942 Apophis, in which he calculated the probability for the asteroid Apophis to collide with a geosynchronous satellite and the consequences of this event to the likelihood of an Earth collision. On the day of the award Marquardt was interviewed by German newspaper Bild which published an article saying that Marquardt found a 100-times higher probability of an Earth-collision in the year 2036 than what NASA gave at the time. Afterwards, nearly all international press reported the story of the boy who "corrected" NASA.The astronomer Fred Watson even said "Marquardt has done a marvellous job. A hundred years ago people used logarithms and hand-calculators and slide rules to work out asteroid orbits. But it says a lot for the world that we live in that a 13 year-old schoolboy can download the right software to do the job and actually find errors in NASA's work. It is quite extraordinary." NASA denied that its figure was wrong.