After years of being conditioned by various media outlets to willingly accept whatever information "the scientists" (and by default NASA as well) choose to release, at times one does have to question the operational motives behind some decisions.

This year has seen a flurry of conspiracy theory activity based around what NASA has or has not said.

Mayan end days calendar dates are being called into question, old apocalyptic movies are being remixed into youtube clips, and the mysterious Comet Elenin coming and going by with a massive movement of passionate people convinced it was in fact something other than what it was being labelled.
Now for the latest installment, the familiar rhetoric attached to another close Earth Approach, Asteroid "2005 YU55".

This asteroid whizzed past on Tuesday / Wednesday this week and the mainstream news has certainly made mention of it, but it seems that there is a bigger picture at work here, with a whole lot of questions left unanswered.
Thankfully this close call has gone by with most people completely unaware of it all, but it does pose some questions, like what else is out there, and what is up with the NASA optical technology?

It has been a very busy year for NASA, with shuttle programmes going off line, the recent troubles at the international space station, and a whole lot of time wasted answering questions and preparing press releases to counter over active conspiracy theorists.

The branch of NASA that has had most to say about all of this, and been responsible for releasing most of the media and "public" resources is JPL, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory < http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ >.

There has been much talk on the internet especially about Mayan Calendars, Hopi Indian Prophesies, Hindu Upanishad's scriptures, and the Christina Bible's End of Days Apocalyptic Book of Revelation of late that I have been following, but I won't go into all of that here as it is not the appropriate time or place, but what has been interesting is the media spin that has been applied to NASA's Official position.

They have certainly played into it and created a feeding frenzy for conspiracy theorists the world over, who have been claiming that NASA has not been entirely honest about some events that have the potential to catastrophically change our world. Turns out that the events in question have occurred as stated, but there still seems to be an air of illusion and trickery about it all.

Regardless, one of the key areas that continually gets discussed is the ability of these agencies to just "put up or shut up" - they could once and for all quieten down the noise by applying some of this amazing technology we are constantly reminded about, to areas of science that a large, and sometimes quite vocal, portion of the population ask questions about. The moon landings for instance - surely there is space telescope technology hanging out in space that can be aimed at these sites to provide everyone with the proof to end the questions. If they have the technology to apparently be able to read license plates from space, then surely they could spot a lunar lander! The latest set of "high res" pictures of the moon landing sites were released earlier in the year to much fanfare, < http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.html >, but really, copy and paste the link and have a look. I was very disappointed. I am not entirely sure what I was expecting, but a little more detail than that considering the massive close up shots they have been delivering of the sun.

The emergence of the JPL Trajectory graphs have sent the conspiracy theory community into a spin. Having real time, interactive access to these computer models buried deep inside of layers of NASA sites has seen some very sensationalist claims being made concerning the state of the universe by a whole cross section of the internet community that really only have the slimmest of scientific data.
NASA on the other hand, one presumes, has a wealth of information about these events, afterall this is one of their primary objectives.

When 2005 YU55 came onto the radar it was apparent that there was quite a collection of information on hand to accurately calculate all that was needed to be known to put the common man at rest, yet this was not the case.

The Official Video Footage from NASA of the asteroid.

With the asteroid flying off into oblivion we are left with the only remnents of it's long awaited visit, some very grainy images. This however poses more questions that an inspired and resounding collective aaaaah from the entertained public.
For instance, given that NASA recently deployed the amazing SOHO camera system to study the sun and solar flares, that sends back almost HD quality images, how come the footage we get of the closest asteroid in decades comes out looking like this?

The official statement:

Using radar data, scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory created this six-frame movie of asteroid 2005 YU55. The data was obtained Nov. 7, 2011 using NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar (located at the Deep Space Network facility in Goldstone, Ca.) At the time, the space rock was approximately 860,000 miles (1.38 million kilometers) away from Earth. At its closest approach on Nov. 8, 2011, YU55 will be about 200,000 miles from Earth. It poses no threat.

Resolution is 4 meters per pixel.

See for yourself.

Some of the comments posted on the NASA website, and also on the official JPL News Channel on Youtube, have been very critical of the poor quality imagery, claiming once again that this is all a part of a grand conspiracy.

• Can you answer this question for me: Why is there so little visual evidence for Yu55 considering how long we have known about it, and why do the videos look suspicious? How do we have a video that seems to represent an oncoming asteroid and nothing showing it passing by earth? My homeroom has already asked these questions this morning...help, please.



• I just don't understand if This is the closest Asteroid Event for the Earth in 200 years how come that s the best pictures NASA can get to us with all the Quadrillion Dollars High tech Hi RES .Deployed in the space ?
  Unless you gays really don't want us to know and see what s really coming I cant see any reasonable explanation which makes more sense for those murky pictures of yours . There s no scientific reason not to obtain High Resolution photos of the object
  
  
• I'd like to know why data from spaceweather.com over the last few months has been altered twice to date? 175m was the stated size of 2005 yu55, being upgraded to 200m then as of two days ago has become 400m.
  If this asteroid past the Earth in 2010 why wasnt it accurately recorded?



• Why does jpl show the asteroid as 200m, the weight and size would affect the speed and the approach distance from the earth and the moon wouldn't it? So the jpl projection must be wrong and out of date. You say in the video you found out last time it went by it was 400m, why hasn't it been updated if you knew a year or more ago it was bigger than 200m. I'm very excited about watching this on my telescope but I'm not sure where to look!

This is a very valid point really.
In this instance there was a perfect opportunity to tilt, aim, roll or rotate any one of a number of high quality, optically advanced space telescopes capable of at the least providing us with stunning HD Quality images of the sun and distant galaxies on an object coming between the earth and the moon. I am by no means suggesting that this was not done to hide anything, but really, if you are wanting to put the best spin on something, make the most out of a story that has got it's own momentum, then you use something other than a toaster or microwave oven to record the only images you will ever have of the closest asteroid in decades surely? It just does not make any sense.
Out of all of the random dangers outside of human influence, the number one surely has to be a comet or asteroid strike? These are supposedly predictable events, and given the opportunity to study an event such as YU55, one would think that the scientific community would be a little more excited about it.

When too much information is not enough information.

This whole event has got some serious lessons for business in here. We all need to promote our products, market to new and existing customers and keep up the conversations.

However when we start letting uneducated and untrained people into the nuts and bolts of our operation, especially inquisitive, creative types with far too much time on their hands, then we had better be prepared to answer some tough questions.

JPL released onto the public domain a set of basic computer models that users could go backwards and forwards through time and see what was happening in our solar system. A great set of tools, I for one had been looking for this exact model for years, and in May there it was. Buried so deep into the 3rd layer of sub domains of the NASA site that you could only get to them by direct link, but nevertheless there they were. Cool interactive computer models of planetary rotation and events such as flight paths of asteroid's and comets of interest.
The conspiracy theorists had a field day, and once the Comet Elenin aspect became apparent with the very convincing major earthquake correlation, it was all on. The earthquake connection is ponderous, I have seen clips,and used the model to verify this myself, that there is also an alignment on the day of the fist Christchurch earthquake on September 4th, 2010. That clip has been "removed by user". Still there are plenty of clips out there still.

So how is your head now?

NASA responded with this statement (click here), but this came shortly after the following video made by NASA in a supposedly "private" in house message to employees, was released. This just further fueled the conspiracy theorists fire.

It all seems like a bad Hollywood movie.