An ex-Microsoft billionaire, Nathan Myhrvold, has accused NASA scientists of making "fundamental mistakes" in estimating the size of asteroids. According to the techie, the method used by the scientists to analyze the size of the asteroids is deeply flawed.
NASA scientists use the data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. Since the time of its launch in 2009, the spacecraft has been clicking pictures of a billion stars, galaxies, asteroids and other celestial objects.
The Neowise project, which is the asteroid-hunting part of WISE, used tha heat emission data of asteroids captured by the spacecraft to calculate the reflectivity and size of more than 158,000 asteroids. In his analysis of the Neowise result, published in the journal Icarus, Myhrvold claims that the entire system is flawed.
"The bad news is it's all basically wrong," Myhrvold told The New York Times. "Unfortunately for a lot of it, it's never going to be as accurate as they had hoped."
Myhrvold claims to have identified a series of irregularities in the data, one after another. This is concerning on the parts of astronomers, especially considering the fact that Neowise and WISE have discovered more asteroids than any other observatory around the world.
The molecular gastronomist further said that astronomers seem to have skipped some important factors while determining the size of the asteroids. For example, they did not apply the Kirchoff's law of thermal radiation to the thermal models they prepared. In addition, the margin of error introduced was completely ignored while extrapolating the data for small sample to the entire population of asteroids.
According to Myhrvold, the errors in the diameter calculated on the basis of WISE data should be around 30 percent. However, in some cases, it is as large as 300 percent.
Meanwhile, the Neowise and WISE teams stand by their results. The team says that Myhrvold's claims are false and should be readily dismissed. Ned Wright, the principal investigator for WISE states that the spacecraft's data match the data captured by other infrared telescopes as well, including IRAS and AKARI.
This is not the fist time that Myhrvold has criticized any study. In 2013, he claimed having found flaws in a study describing the growth rate of dinosaurs.
The following video describes a potentially hazardous asteroid discovered by Neowise: