Headline July 20, 2018/ " ' ! DUMB *SPACE* DATA ? ' "

" ' ! DUMB *SPACE* DATA ? ' "

CHALLENGING NASA's asteroid experts.......... and an amateur has taken on the space scientists, saying their figures are flawed............

The claims have roiled a small, congenial community by saying its member know less than they think about certain space objects.

*DR. Myhrvold has accused the Neowise scientists of going into a NASA archive of planetary results, changing some of the copied numbers and deleting others without giving notice*.

"They went back and rewrote history," he said.

'DUMB THINGS' IN THE DATA : The squabble revolves around data collected by NASA's WISE  spacecraft, which scanned the skies beginning in 2009, taking pictures of hundreds of millions of  distant galaxies and stars.

Asteroids were also whizzing through WISE's field of view, and the Neowise project was established to analyze them.

By looking at heat radiated by an asteroid, it is possible to estimate its size and the reflectivity of its surface. The Neowise data is by far the largest collection, and hundreds of scientific papers have cited those findings.

When Dr. Myhrvold made his initial claims the Neowise scientists made fun of a few errors, like an equation that mixed up radius and diameter.

" It is too bad Myhrvold doesn't have Google's bug-finding policy, Dr. Wright told Scientific American. "If he did, I'd be rich."

Dr. Mainzer also said at the time, "We believe at this point it's best to allow the process of peer review - the foundation of scientific process - to move forward."

Dr. Myhrvold has followed an eclectic career since leaving Microsoft nearly two decades ago. He has gained renown for six-volume cook book called "Modernist Cuisine," and has been scorned for the work of his company, Intellectual Ventures, which -

Buys patents and collects licensing fees.

He is also an avid digger of dinosaur fossils, with a number of published paleontology papers.

Earlier this year, Icarus published Dr. Myhrvold's first paper on how reflected sunlight affects  measurements of asteroids at the shorter infrared wavelengths measured by WISE. It accepted  and posted a second paper last month containing Dr. Myhrvold's criticism of NASA asteroid data.

Among them is the case of copied numbers.

The Neowise researchers model was calibrated with diameters for about a hundred asteroids that have been measured by radar, visiting spacecraft or when an asteroid passed in front of a distant star.

When the scientist reported their findings, they did not include the estimates produced by their models, which would have a given sense of how good the model is. Instead they included the earlier measurements.

Others astronomers agreed that the Neowise scientists were not clear about what numbers they were reporting.

"They did the same kind of dumb things," said Alan W. Harris, a retired NASA  asteroid expert who was one of the reviewers of Dr. Myhrvold's second paper.

Dr. Myhrvold's has accused the Neowise scientists of going into a NASA archive of planetary results, changing some of the copied numbers and deleting others without giving notice. "They went back and rewrote history, " he said.

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

Dr. Harris said he did not see nefarious behavior by the Neowise scientist, but agreed, "That's still weird."

The Honor and Serving of the latest Global Operational Research on The Beauty and History of Space continues.

With respectful dedication to all NASA, all Space Research Scientists, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all "register" on The World Students Society and..........  Twitter - !E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

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