Response to Wright et al. 2018: Even more serious problems with NEOWISE
arXiv:1812.06516
Abstract
Wright et al. 2018 (W2018) responded to certain criticisms of the NEOWISE results raised by Myhrvold (2018a, 2018b) in a preprint submitted for publication to Icarus. This paper responds to W2018 and has been updated to address comments from two rounds of peer review at Icarus. Points raised by Wright et al. during peer review and in recent publications are also addressed. The response here presents issues of broad interest to the planetary science community. W2018 acknowledges some of the most serious issues identified by Myhrvold, including the importance of Kirchhoff's law and the misrepresentation of diameters copied from previous radar, occultation, and spacecraft observations as NEOWISE thermal modeling results. W2018 confirms copying ROS diameters for 117 asteroids but does not report actual modeled diameters or the identity of the asteroids involved. W2018 confirms that many NEOWISE "fit" curves do not pass near the data points they claimed to fit. W2018 reveals more serious problems with NEOWISE results than had previously been understood. Wright et al. belatedly disclose a software bug, found and corrected in 2011, that apparently corrupted the vast majority of NEOWISE results, which have yet to be corrected. W2018 asserts that the bug had rare and small impacts on results but elsewhere provides analysis that directly contradicts this claim. We learn from W2018 that H values used by NEOWISE were not taken from the literature, as claimed, but rather derived by fitting data, a method inconsistent with prior NEOWISE papers and practice in thermal modeling. The systematic underestimation of WISE observation errors shown in Myhrvold 2018b is confirmed with a new analysis of repeated observation of calibration stars. Each argument in W2018 is shown here to be mistaken. Ultimately, W2018 reveals why the results of the empirical examination that Myhrvold published were important.
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