A new paper by ex-Microsoft billionaire Nathan Myhrvold suggests that findings stemming from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope are fundamentally flawed in their assessment of the size of more than 157,000 asteroids. However, some in the community believe that it is Myhrvold's techniques that are flawed.
Together, the WISE telescope and its follow-up mission NEOWISE have led to the discovery of more asteroids than any other observatory thus far. However, Myhrvold claims that papers utilizing data from WISE and NEOWISE are rife with mistakes.
"None of their results can be replicated," he said. "I found one irregularity after another."
For example, in a 2011 paper, Myhrvold claims that they ignored the margin of error present when they used a small sample size to generalize to an entire population. In addition, he suggests that they ignored Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation when creating thermal models of the asteroids.
"Asteroids are more variable than we thought they were," he said.
Despite these bold claims, the WISE and NEOWISE teams stand by their findings and point to numerous flaws in Myhrvold's paper.
"For every mistake I found in his paper, if I got a bounty, I would be rich," said Ned Wright, the principal investigator for WISE at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Wright said that WISE's data matches up with AKARI and IRAS, two other infrared telescopes, and were obtained in combination with radar observations and observations made with spacecraft, making the data very accurate.
"Our team has seen the paper in various versions for many months now, and we have tried to point out problems to the author," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator for NEOWISE at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We have strongly encouraged that the paper be submitted to a journal and peer reviewed. Instead, he released it without peer review."
Myhrvold says he is still in the process of fixing the errors and that they are minor enough that they do not alter his main criticisms of WISE and NEOWISE. Furthermore, he believes that their vehement criticism is due to their proposal for a future telescope called NEOCam that will be used to hunt asteroids.
"They're up for this NEOCam thing, and they're afraid it looks bad," he said. "And it does look bad."
The findings were published May 23 on the pre-print server arXiv.
