It is the responsibility of NASA to monitor asteroids in space to see if there are any possible threats, but one critic believes that NASA has done a sloppy job with this.
Nathan Myhrvold Picks A Fight With NASA
In 2016, tech billionaire Dr. Nathan Myhrvold publicly criticized NASA's analysis of asteroids. He specifically slammed data in the NEOWISE project, which is the asteroid aspect of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.
The data in the NEOWISE project sets limits on the probable compositions of asteroids in the solar system. The data organizes the characteristics of the 158,000 asteroid tracked in space.
Myhrvold, the former chief technologist with Microsoft, asserted that NASA made misleading conclusions about the size of many asteroids. In a response, NASA slammed Myhrvold back by saying that his data has never went through a scientific peer review.
That all changed when journal Icarus peer-reviewed Myhrvold's data and announced in June 2018 that his study is going to be published. NASA continues to defend its findings and opposes Myhrvold's peer-reviewed study.
The Problem With NEOWISE
In addition to the peer-reviewed paper, Myhrvold published an article on Medium so that he could directly explain his argument with less scientific jargon. In the article, Myhrvold asserts that scientists with the NEOWISE project may have made scientific errors with the data and tried to cover up any issues.
"As it happens, my recent papers and other publications have documented strong evidence ... that the issues I am calling misconduct in the NEOWISE papers were not inadvertent," Myhrvold wrote on Medium. "They appear to have been deliberate choices made repeatedly by the NEOWISE team over a long period of time."
Although most of NASA has opposed Myhrvold's argument, one scientist is on his side. NASA's David Morrison says that Myhrvold is correct because reflected sunlight has resulted in incorrect asteroid measurements.
What Needs To Be Done About Asteroids
Myhrvold wants NASA to fix the NEOWISE data, and he wants the entire process to be transparent. He believes that this process could help NASA discover new data about asteroids.
He cited the Tunguska event of 1908, a large explosion in Eastern Russia that may been caused by an asteroid, as a reason for NASA to fix the data.
"If that had happened in a populated part of Earth ... the whole 20th century would have been scarred by this," Myhrvold told GeekWire. "We basically had our wakeup call on asteroids, and we didn't hear it."
