{"id":7530,"date":"2016-05-31T00:00:33","date_gmt":"2016-05-31T07:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7530"},"modified":"2016-06-01T00:01:13","modified_gmt":"2016-06-01T07:01:13","slug":"nasa-doesnt-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/05\/31\/nasa-doesnt-know\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA Doesn’t Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

How Big Are Those Killer Asteroids? A Critic Says NASA Doesn\u2019t Know.<\/h1>\n

By\u00a0KENNETH CHANG<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

More than\u00a014,000 known asteroids<\/a>\u00a0zip through\u00a0Earth<\/a>\u2019s neighborhood. They will all miss Earth in the coming decades.<\/p>\n

But hundreds of thousands more have not yet been discovered, and whether any of those are on course to slam into our planet, no one knows. So finding and tracking all the asteroids that could cross Earth\u2019s path would allow officials to issue warnings and potentially provide time to deflect dangerous ones.<\/p>\n

The community of scientists contemplating such doomsday possibilities is small and usually cordial \u2014 at least until\u00a0Nathan P. Myhrvold<\/a>\u00a0barged in. Once the chief technologist at Microsoft, Dr. Myhrvold moved on to other endeavors like a six-volume,\u00a02<\/a>,438-page compendium of cooking knowledge<\/a>\u00a0that has been celebrated by chefs. (A sequel, about baking, is in the works.)<\/p>\n

He has also become a statistics scold of scientists.<\/p>\n

His latest target is\u00a0NASA<\/a>, in a squabble over data from the\u00a0Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer<\/a>\u00a0spacecraft.<\/p>\n

WISE, launched in 2009, snapped images of three-quarters of a billion stars, galaxies and other celestial objects, including the heat emissions of asteroids.<\/p>\n

An offshoot called\u00a0Neowise<\/a>\u00a0used the heat data to calculate the size and reflectivity of 158,000 asteroids.<\/p>\n

Dr. Myhrvold contends that the Neowise analysis is deeply flawed. \u201cThe bad news is it\u2019s all basically wrong,\u201d he said. \u201cUnfortunately for a lot of it, it\u2019s never going to be as accurate as they had hoped.\u201d<\/p>\n

He submitted\u00a0his own\u00a0<\/a>analysis of the Neowise<\/a>\u00a0results<\/a>\u00a0to the journal\u00a0Icarus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYT<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times How Big Are Those Killer Asteroids? A Critic Says NASA Doesn\u2019t Know. By\u00a0KENNETH CHANG More than\u00a014,000 known asteroids\u00a0zip through\u00a0Earth\u2019s neighborhood. They will all miss Earth in the coming decades. But hundreds of thousands more have not yet been discovered, and whether any of those are on course to slam into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7530\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}