For Asteroid-Hunting Astronomers, Nathan Myhrvold Says the Sky Is Falling

Astrogeology, Asteroids, Robots, Space Flight & Extraterrestrial Matters

Date posted: 05/27/16

Lee Billings reports that Nathan Myhrvold, wealthy former Microsoft technologist, current patent tycoon, classically trained chef, bestselling author, prize-winning photographer, Ph.D.-holding physicist, has a new obsession... killer asteroids, or rather the researchers he suspects of botching their study. Astronomers have found more than 14,000 potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs) that buzz our planet with alarming regularity, and estimate that hundreds of thousands more await discovery. Much of what we know about NEOs comes from a single spacecraft, NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and its offshoot NEOWISE observing program. But according to a new paper Myhrvold has submitted to the journal Icarus, much of the NEOWISE catalogue is flat-out wrong. The NEOWISE team, he maintains, has miscalculated the sizes and masses of many asteroids. Because bigger rocks make bigger booms when they strike Earth, Myhrvold claims raise the chilling possibility that when and if another errant asteroid is found hurtling our way, no one will really know how dangerous it is, not even the supposed experts. Most of the asteroids that we know about are from NEOWISE, Myhrvold says. The previous largest survey was 2,200 asteroids, and they have looked at more than 150,000. Hundreds of scientific papers have used these results, and those results ought to be replicable, but I have not been able to do that. That is the short-term issue. The longer-term issue is that we must understand asteroids for more practical reasons, because they hit Earth all the time. If confirmed, the Myhrvold work could turn the small, quiet field of asteroid studies upside down, throwing scientific textbooks, careers and plans for next-generation NEO surveys into turmoil. But NASA and the NEOWISE team say Myhrvold critique is deeply flawed, and that the NEOWISE results are corroborated by data from multiple independent surveys.