The Tracking Layer: A Specification for the House Measurement Program, Built Only from Public Pipes
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: A measurement program is only as honest as the tracking underneath it. Every position, velocity, and conjunction claim the house measurement program — the Crossing Watch observational program (house build B4) and the UAP Atlas — will ever make rides on an ephemeris produced by somebody else's pipe, and each pipe delivers a different precision by orders of magnitude. This paper specifies the program's tracking layer: five layers assembled entirely from public pipes — the TLE/SGP4 catalogue layer, the conjunction layer, the satellite laser ranging layer, the Deep Space Network layer, and the CCSDS format layer that lets the others be read at all — with each layer's delivered precision evaluated from the published record, the claim ceiling that precision imposes stated on the layer's face, and the house instruments and questions each layer can and cannot serve named one by one. The specification's central table is a discipline, not a menu: a claim may not be carried by a layer whose error is larger than the claim. On the public pipes alone, that rule leaves the program able to do catalogue-grade statistics, millimetre-class geodesy on cooperative targets, and flagship-class deep-space tracking — and unable, on any public pipe, to produce a sub-kilometre trajectory for an uncatalogued, uncooperative transient. That last ceiling is the paper's most important line, and it is printed at the same size as the capabilities.
Author: Aldred, William Alexander
Language: English
Subfield: Aerospace Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225311968