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NASA fires back in spat over asteroid data

Image: WISE spacecraft
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. WISE observations of near-Earth objects were analyzed for the NEOWISE mission. (Credit: NASA)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – NASA issued a statement today disputing Seattle tech icon Nathan Myhrvold’s critique of asteroid data analysis from the space agency’s NEOWISE mission.

The statement follows up on reports published this week by GeekWire and othermedia outlets. In those reports, Myhrvold said NEOWISE’s analysis relied on flawed statistical calculations, which resulted in incorrect or highly uncertain measurements for thousands of asteroids.

When GeekWire showed Myhrvold’s critique to scientists associated with NEOWISE and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, they identified what they said were serious errors – including misinterpretations of NEOWISE’s methods and an apparent confusion between radius and diameter in one key equation. GeekWire’s report on Monday referred to those problems, as well as Myhrvold’s acknowledgment of mistakes.

Today’s NASA statement refers to those errors as “mistakes that an independent peer review process is designed to catch.”

“While critique and re-examination of published results are essential to the scientific process, it is important that any paper undergo peer review by an independent journal before it can be seriously considered,” NASA said. “This completes a necessary step to ensure science results are independently validated, reproducible and of value to the science community.”

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India’s space shuttle aces first test flight

Image: RLV-TD
India’s RLV-TD prototype rises from its launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Center. (Credit: ISRO)

India’s space agency says it put its winged space shuttle prototype, known as the RLV-TD, through a successful first test flight today.

In a congratulatory tweet, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the launch of “India’s first indigenous space shuttle.”

The Reusable Launch Vehicle Technology Demonstrator was designed to validate the uncrewed craft’s autonomous navigation system, guidance and control, thermal protection system and other elements of the mission profile under hypersonic conditions, the Indian Space Research Organization said in a news release.

ISRO said RLV-TD was launched from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota atop an HS9 solid rocket booster and rose to a height of about 40 miles (65 kilometers). Then it glided back down under autonomous control and made a simulated landing into a designated patch of the Bay of Bengal, about 280 miles from Sriharikota.

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Nathan Myhrvold stirs up an asteroid argument

Image: Nathan Myhrvold
Nathan Myhrvold shows off a fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite in his office at Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – Millionaire techie Nathan Myhrvold is used to stirring up controversy over issues ranging from patent licensing to dinosaur growth rates, but now he’s weighing in on an even bigger debate: the search for potentially hazardous asteroids.

In a 110-page research paper posted to the ArXiv pre-print server and submitted to the journal Icarus for peer-reviewed publication, Myhrvold says the most comprehensive survey of near-Earth asteroids ever done, known as NEOWISE, suffers from serious statistical flaws.

“They made a set of numbers that look right, They have what Stephen Colbert calls ‘truthiness.’ But that doesn’t mean they are right,” he told GeekWire today during an interview at the Bellevue headquarters of Intellectual Ventures, the company he founded.

On the other side of the debate, NEOWISE’s principal investigator, Amy Mainzer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says it’s Myhrvold’s numbers that don’t look right.

“The paper contains multiple mistakes, including the confusion between diameter and radius (which is by itself enough to render the results wrong),” she wrote in an email to GeekWire. “Nonsensical asteroid diameters are presented throughout by the author.”

Mainzer noted that Myhrvold’s paper has not yet gone through formal peer review.

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Mega-tsunamis left their mark on ancient Mars

Image: Ancient Mars
This artist’s impression shows Mars as it might have looked 4 billion years ago, with the complex shoreline of Chryse Planitia front and center. (Credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO)

Liquid water is almost non-existent on modern Mars, but scientists say sedimentary deposits show signs that tsunami waves as high as 400 feet washed over Martian shorelines billions of years ago.

The claim, laid out on Thursday in Nature Scientific Reports, may sound like the Red Planet equivalent of “The Day After Tomorrow,” the 2004 climate-scare movie that showed New York getting drowned. There is a climate angle to the newly published research, but a more apt comparison would be 1998’s “Deep Impact,” in which a crashing comet did something similar.

“The tsunamis could have been triggered by bolide impacts, which, about every 3 million years, generated marine impact craters approximately 30 kilometers in diameter,” study co-author Thomas Platz, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, said in a news release about the study.

As spectacular as it sounds, the findings are consistent with how mega-tsunamis happen on Earth, and what scientists expected on Mars as well. There’s lots of other geological evidence that Mars once harbored a large northern ocean. But if that’s the case, there should have been occasional asteroid or cosmic strikes that produced giant waves.

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Make the most of a super-sized Mars

This image of Mars was captured on May 12 by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and UVIS. Click on the image for an annotated view. (Credit: NASA, / ESA / STScI / AURA / J. Bell / ASU / M. Wolff / STScI)
This image of Mars was captured on May 12 by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and UVIS. (Credit: NASA, / ESA / STScI / AURA / J. Bell / ASU / M. Wolff / STScI)

For the next couple of weeks, Mars will look bigger than it’s looked in a decade! And no, this is not a hoax.

Every August, the Internet goes a little crazy over claims that the Red Planet is about to look twice as big as the moon in the night sky. That viral hoax got started in 2003, when some folks scrambled up reports about Mars’ historic close approach during that summer.

Mars isn’t coming quite as close as it did back then, and it certainly won’t be anywhere near as big as the moon. But by May 30, the distance between Earth and Mars will shrink to 46.8 million miles, which is closer than any other approach since 2005.

That closeness is due to the position of Earth and Mars in their elliptical orbits as they line up with each other and with the sun. On May 22, Mars will be directly opposite the sun, looming right in the center of the night sky at astronomical midnight. The occasion is known as opposition.

Because Mars’ full disk is illuminated, as seen from Earth, opposition is an especially good time to check out the Red Planet with your naked eye, with binoculars … or with the Hubble Space Telescope.

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‘Star Trek’ exhibit relives 50 years of the future

Image: Starship Enterprise
A model of the Starship Enterprise hangs from the EMP Museum’s ceiling. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)

From several yards away, the bridge of the Starship Enterprise looks as if it was beamed down from the 23rd century into the “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” exhibition that opens Saturday at Seattle’s EMP Museum.

But up close, you can tell it’s a 50-year-old movie prop, with rocker switches from the ’60s and bits of plastic peeling off the control console.

In a weird way, that’s a big part of the golden-anniversary exhibition’s appeal. When the TV show had its premiere in 1966, “Star Trek” was all about a bright and shiny future. It still is, but the exhibition also casts a spotlight on the social issues and foibles that have shaped the saga over the course of five decades.

“Star Trek” is famous not only for its optimistic vision of spaceflight and technology, but also for its allegorical references to the civil rights movement and cultural diversity, East-West tensions and the rise of environmentalism, gender identity and same-sex relationships.

“All these are ingredients that you can see get funneled into ‘Star Trek,’” museum curator Brooks Peck said today during a preview of the exhibit. And they’re funneled into the exhibition as well.

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First Mars crews will steer robots from orbit

Image: Mars orbital habitat
Is this how the first human missions to Mars will unfold? NASA’s chief favors doing extended operations from orbit, rather than starting out with a crew landing on the surface. (Credit: NASA)

The first humans to reach Mars almost certainly won’t go down to the surface, but will manage fleets of rovers from Martian orbit.

That’s the view of Andy Weir, the author behind a wildly popular space saga titled “The Martian.” But it’s also the view of NASA’s administrator, Charles Bolden, and lots of other mission planners. NASA’s current plan calls for the first crews to set up shop around Mars and its moons in the 2030s.

The landing vs. orbiting issue came up today during a space-themed session at Transformers, a daylong conference organized by The Washington Post in the nation’s capital. Weir’s novel (and the movie it inspired) focuses on an astronaut left behind on the Red Planet’s surface, but the engineer-turned-author said the initial flights to Mars would probably follow a safer storyline.

He noted that robotic missions to Mars, such as the ones involving NASA’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, require a long latency period between sending commands and getting back the results coming out of those commands. That’s due to the distance between the rovers and their controllers on Earth.

“The biggest benefit to having an astronaut on the surface, in terms of the science, is that that astronaut has a brain,” Weir said. “An astronaut doesn’t have a five- to 20-minute latency in communicating what he or she wants to do on the surface of Mars. So the very first humans-to-Mars-area mission, I suspect, will be a whole bunch of rovers on the surface of Mars, and humans in orbit controlling them. What do you think?”

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Astronauts reflect on future final-frontier films

Image: Terry Virts on ISS
NASA astronaut Terry Virts aims his camera through the Cupola, the best window on the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

“A Beautiful Planet” is a 3-D visual feast for the eyes, but the astronauts who filmed the IMAX space extravaganza made sure that’s not all it is.

For example, NASA astronaut Terry Virts said he recalled the feeling of life on the International Space Station as he watched the movie today at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center. “When I was going down into the Soyuz to say goodbye, I can feel what that suit felt like. Just how to move in weightlessness,” he said.

His crewmate, Kjell Lindgren, was struck by the sounds of a spacewalk.

“The microphone captured the sound coming through the structure of the suit,” he told GeekWire. “The anchors banging around, the sound of the breathing, just the suit flexing, the joints slipping on each other. Just the sensation of what it’s like to move outside, and to see these guys moving around outside. That’s what it feels like. It’s very visceral.”

When a spacewalker’s tether pulled taut, the resulting twang drew a gasp from the audience – as if they were watching a “Gravity”-type thriller, not a real-life documentary about the space station and our planet below.

That’s the kind of scene that producer/director/editor Toni Myers, who’s been in on 10 IMAX movies, loves to spring on filmgoers. “There’s such a thing as a golden eight seconds, and that was one of them,” she said.

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Space station celebrates its 100,000th orbit

Image: International Space Station
The International Space Station has circled Earth more than 100,000 times. (NASA photo)

The International Space Station registered its 100,000th orbit around the planet today, providing NASA with a news hook for looking at what humanity’s farthest-out outpost has done over the past 17 years.

“During that time, over 1,922 research investigations have been performed,” NASA said in a Tumblr post marking the occasion. “More than 1,200 scientific results publications have been produced as a result.”

Among the best-known studies are those documenting the long-term health effects of spaceflight – findings that serve as cautionary tales for future trips to Mars. Even before the first elements of the space station were launched in 1998, researchers knew that extended stays in weightlessness resulted in bone and muscle loss. But space station studies showed that long-term spacefliers suffered vision impairment and headaches as well.

Future research will look at ways to mitigate or compensate for such health issues, including electromagnetic shields to guard against space radiation.

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Magnetoshell gets in on NASA’s way-out funding

Image: Magnetoshell aerocapture concept
MSNW’s magnetoshell aerocapture concept could help ease spaceships into orbit. (Credit: MSNW)

A system that would use magnetic fields to ease a spacecraft into orbit after an interplanetary journey has won a $500,000 grant from NASA’s advanced research program for MSNW, a company based in Redmond. Wash.

The money for MSNW is one of eight Phase II awards made through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, also known as NIAC. Other projects look into such way-out ideas as suspended animation, beamed energy for interstellar travel and a satellite-airplane hybrid that could stay up in the air for months at a time.

MSNW’s magnetoshell aerocapture system is designed to take advantage of aerodynamic drag as well as magnetized plasma to slow a spacecraft down and as it dips through a planet’s atmosphere.

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