OT another NASA critic = Tech Expert Says NASA's Asteroid Data Is Flawed

[a425couple]

from
https://www.outerplaces.com/science/item/18600-nasa-asteroid-data-flawed

(Disasters with asteroids = real common theme in life and Sci-Fi!)

This Tech Expert Says NASA's Asteroid Data Is Flawed—Now Scientists Are
Backing Him Up

Astronomy Space Solar System

Science Science News
Chris MahonThursday, 14 June 2018 - 1:14PM
This Tech Expert Says NASA's Asteroid Data Is Flawed—Now Scientists
Are Backing Him Up <>
Image credit: YouTube

NASA is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to scientific
research: Between the Hubble and Chandra telescopes, the multiple Mars
rovers rolling across Mars' surface, and the International Space
Station, they've pulled in more data about space, the Solar System, and
our galaxy than just about anyone else.

One of NASA's proudest accomplishments is the NeoWISE database, a
catalog of around 158,000 asteroids and near-Earth objects that lists
their diameter and reflectivity.

The database is one of the cornerstones of NASA's ongoing mission to
protect the Earth from an asteroid impact, but now the data from NeoWISE
has come under fierce criticism from a former Microsoft chief
technologist named Dr. Nathan P. Myhrvold, who has accused NASA of using
shoddy methods and even doctoring data.

Myhrvold is something of a Renaissance man and cross-discipline
provocateur: Aside from his gig at Microsoft, he's published a
critically praised six-volume cookbook titled Modernist Cuisine and
several academic papers on paleontology, including one in Nature that
accused some of the top paleontologists in the world of having "serious
errors and irregularities" in their research.

The feud with NASA reached a high point in 2016 when Myrhvold revealed
research that criticized NASA's analysis of asteroids spotted by the
WISE mission, originally conducted between 2009 and 2011.

The WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) space telescope was
designed to spot far-off objects, but incidentally captured many images
of asteroids over the course of its mission. The NeoWISE project is
built on the observations of the telescope, but those observations are
flawed, according to Myrhvold, because WISE wasn't designed to spot
close objects like asteroids.

"The science is terrible," says Myhrvold.

Unfortunately for Myhrvold, his 2016 research (which was not
peer-reviewed) also turned out to have some flaws.

Apparently, a few of his equations contained mistakes, including one
that confused radius with diameter.

Now, two years later, Myrhvold has successfully published a paper on how
light reflectivity affects the measurement of asteroids in the journal
Icarus, along with a companion paper that lays out his criticisms of
NASA's methodology when it comes to cataloging asteroids, including
claims that NASA has deleted asteroids from its database, used old,
inaccurate measurements, failed to release information that could be
used to independently verify their data, and even altered measurements
post-hoc.

"They went back and rewrote history," Myhrvold says.

"What it shows is even this far in, they're still lying. They haven't
come clean."

Before you dismiss Myrhvold's accusations as the ravings of an
intellectual with far too much time on his hands, consider this—he's got
some of the brightest minds in science currently backing up his research
criticizing all of NASA's asteroid data.

"For the most part, I think Myhrvold is correct," said David Morrison, a
planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

"I do think it's valuable for someone, a smart outsider, to go in and
analyze data that are important," he added. "That has to help science.
That cannot be a bad thing."

Jean-Luc Margot, Chairman of the earth, planetary and space sciences
department at U.C.L.A., says his preliminary follow-up studies of
Myhrvold's research have produced results that seem to verify his
findings recently published in Icarus.

Icarus now expects Dr. Amy Mainzer, a researcher at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and the principal investigator for NeoWISE, to
publish a rebuttal paper to answer Myhrvold's accusations.