New paper suggests: NASA is rigging Asteroid Data, from "Near Earth Objects"

[Cosmos]

Just came across this:

Billionaire technologist accuses NASA asteroid mission of bad statistics:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/billionaire-technologist-accuses-nasa-asteroid-mission-bad-statistics

How Big Are Those Killer Asteroids? A Critic Says NASA Doesn’t Know.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/science/asteroids-nathan-myhrvold-nasa.html?_r=4

The paper of Nathan Myhrvold:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06490

Selected excerpts from the links above:

Nathan Myhrvold—ex–Microsoft billionaire, patent accumulator, dinosaur geek, and noted molecular gastronomist—has a new obsession: asteroids. The CEO of Bellevue, Washington–based Intellectual Ventures says that scientists using a prominent NASA space telescope have made fundamental mistakes in their assessment of the size of more than 157,000 asteroids they have observed.

[...] Myhrvold says that the WISE and NEOWISE teams’ papers are riddled with statistical missteps. “None of their results can be replicated,” he tells ScienceInsider. “I found one irregularity after another.”

In a 2011 paper, the WISE and NEOWISE teams claim to determine the diameter of asteroids with an accuracy of better than 10%. But Myhrvold says they made mistakes, such as ignoring the margin of error introduced when extrapolating from a small sample size to an entire population. They also neglected to include Kirchhoff’s law of thermal radiation in their thermal models of the asteroids. Based on his own models, Myhrvold says that errors in the asteroid diameters based on WISE data should be 30%. In some cases, the size errors rise to as large as 300%. “Asteroids are more variable than we thought they were,” he says. He has submitted the paper to the journal Icarus for review.

An offshoot called Neowise used the heat data to calculate the size and reflectivity of 158,000 asteroids.

Dr. Myhrvold contends that the Neowise analysis is deeply flawed. “The bad news is it’s all basically wrong,” he said. “Unfortunately for a lot of it, it’s never going to be as accurate as they had hoped.”

The previous NEOWISE analysis assumes Kirchhoff's law does not apply. It also deviates strongly from established statistical practice and systematically underestimates the sampling error inherent in observing potentially irregular asteroids from a finite sample of observations. As a result, the new analysis finds asteroid diameter and other physical properties that have large differences from published NEOWISE results, with greatly increased error estimates. NEOWISE results have a claimed +/-10% accuracy for diameter estimates, but this is unsupported by any calculations and undermined because NEOWISE results for 102 asteroids appear to have had the diameter from prior radar and occultation studies simply copied rather than being due to NEOWISE thermal modeling.