A years-long spat between asteroid hunters at NASA and multimillionaire entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold has finally made it past peer review.
Since 2016, Myhrvold has argued that there are fatal flaws in the data from NASA’s NEOWISE mission to hunt space rocks. NEOWISE has spotted and studied at least 158,000 asteroids in infrared wavelengths—more than any other project in history—and its results underpin many recent asteroid studies. NASA is working to develop a follow-up space telescope that would use the same scientific approach to fulfil a mandate from the US Congress to discover nearly all of the space rocks that could pose a threat to Earth.
After 18 months of peer review, and plenty of acrimony on both sides, Myhrvold’s latest critique appeared on 22 May on the website of the journal Icarus. Among other things, he argues that NEOWISE estimates of asteroid diameters should not be trusted—a crucial challenge, because the size of an asteroid determines how much damage it would cause if it hit Earth.
“These observations are the best we’re going to have for a very long time,” says Myhrvold. “And they weren’t really analysed very well at all.”
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