Nathan Myhrvold: ‘Nasa doesn’t want to admit it’s wrong about asteroids’

The maverick inventor, ex-Microsoft executive and ‘patent troll’ is battling Nasa on its asteroid data and exploring pizza scienceNathan Myhrvold is the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, founder ofthe controversial patent asset company Intellectual Ventures and the main author of the six-volume, 2,300-pageModernist Cuisine cookbook, which explores the science of cooking. Currently, he is taking on Nasa over its measurement of asteroid sizes.For thepast couple of years, you ’ve been fighting with Nasa about its analysis of near-Earth asteroid size. You ’ve just published a33-page scientific paper criticising the methods used by its Neowise project team to estimate the size and other properties of approximately 164,000 asteroids. You have also published along blog post explaining the problem. Where did Nasa go wrong and is it over or underestimating size?Nasa ’s Wise space telescope [Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer] measured the asteroids in four different wavelengths in the infrared. My main beef is with how they analysed that data. What I think happened is they made some poor choices of statistical methods. Then, to cover that up, they didn ’t publish a lot of the information that would help someone else replicate it. I’m afraid they have both over- and underestimated. The effect changes depending on the size of the asteroid and what it’s made of. The studies were advertised as being accurate to plus or minus 10%. In fact, it is more like ...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Science Technology Nasa Space Food & drink Business Life and style Dinosaurs Health Cervical cancer Food science Asteroids Astronomy Source Type: news