---
title: "Four Dynamicists Ran It Backwards. The Orbit Is Still Bounded At 12,940 Years."
dek: "Two of the four were told they were fitting a piece of launch debris. Two were told nothing at all. The primed pair and the blind pair landed in the same millennium, and nobody's run reached a rocket."
kind: analysis (Analysis)
desk: Off-World
author: Ambrose Teague and Dr. Ilse Vantongeren (fictional)
published: 2026-08-24T11:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/still-bounded-at-thirteen-thousand
tags: ANALYST 4C-0117, orbit determination, back-integration, area-to-mass ratio, blind analysis
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

# Four Dynamicists Ran It Backwards. The Orbit Is Still Bounded At 12,940 Years.

*Two of the four were told they were fitting a piece of launch debris. Two were told nothing at all. The primed pair and the blind pair landed in the same millennium, and nobody's run reached a rocket.*

Two of the four dynamicists were told they were fitting a piece of launch debris. Two were told nothing at all. All four stopped in the same millennium.

The object is ANALYST 4C-0117, tracked 1,147 times in nine years by a national space-surveillance network and [never issued a catalogue number](/article/never-issued-a-number), as this newspaper reports separately today.

We took those 1,147 released observation summaries, added 2,412 amateur optical positions going back to 1994, and paid four people on three continents to run the orbit backwards, separately, with no contact between them.

They come back at 12,781 years, 12,940, 12,948 and 13,091. The spread is 310 years — 2.4 per cent.

## What "bounded at 12,940 years" means

Back-integration is not a telescope pointed at the past. It is a solution wound backwards, and every year you wind it the uncertainty grows.

We set the stopping rule before any run began, and we set it in metres rather than in judgement: a run stops at the year its one-sigma position uncertainty exceeds 470 kilometres, which is the width of the orbit itself. Past that point you are no longer tracking an orbit; you are describing a region of space that contains one.

Every run reaches that year with the orbit still bounded — never hyperbolic, never grazing the atmosphere, never escaping through a lunar encounter. Nothing fails. The arithmetic simply runs out of resolution while the object is still going round.

> **Figure:** Four back-integrations, one orbit: the year each run stops — see https://theyburied.com/article/still-bounded-at-thirteen-thousand

## The ratio that holds it up

The reason the runs survive that far is a single number, and it comes from the object's own behaviour rather than from any model.

Across nine years including a full solar maximum, the perigee altitude has not moved outside 1.1 kilometres. An object at 731 kilometres feels the atmosphere expand and contract with the solar cycle, and what it does about that fixes the ratio of its cross-sectional area to its mass.

Here that ratio is at most 0.0009 square metres per kilogram.

A thermal blanket sits at about 2.4. A fairing panel, 0.31. A spent upper stage, one of the densest things we abandon in orbit, 0.0071 — eight times too high.

Nought point nought nought nought nine is a solid aluminium sphere about sixty-two centimetres across, or a steel one the size of a grapefruit. It is not a fragment, not a shroud, not a panel, and nothing with the surface-to-weight of manufactured debris gets near it.

Feed a light object into these integrations and they come apart within a few centuries, because radiation pressure dominates and the model uncertainty compounds. Feed in this one and they do not.

> You lied to me about the provenance and you did not need to. My number would have been the same.
>
> — Prof. Ilaria Venturoli-Grimshaw

## What the priming did, and did not do

Dr. Yusuf Aranda-Mbeki in Cape Town and Prof. Ilaria Venturoli-Grimshaw in Padua were told the object was launch debris of unrecorded origin. Dr. Song-hee Baptiste-Kwan in Montréal and Dr. Fenella Okonjo-Strand in Uppsala were told only that the positions were real and that they should not try to identify the object.

The two who were told something bracket the result: 12,781 and 13,091, the shortest and the longest of the four. The two who were told nothing sit eight years apart.

That is a pattern. With two people in each group it is not a finding, and we will not dress it as one.

What the priming did not do is move anybody toward a rocket. Both primed runs were looking for a launch and neither found one, and Venturoli-Grimshaw, who is angrier with this newspaper than anyone else quoted in it, re-ran her fit after being debriefed and moved 189 years closer to the others.

## What the number is not

It is not a birthday. Venturoli-Grimshaw's objection, printed unedited below, is that an orbit does not predate anything, and that the honest form of the sentence is *consistent with having existed then*.

She is right about the grammar and we have left our own sentence standing above hers rather than quietly swapping it, because the correction belongs to her.

The finding, in her form and in ours, is this. An object presently in Earth orbit has a motion that runs back twelve thousand nine hundred and forty years without breaking, on four independent derivations, published with their working — and the first object anybody launched went up sixty-nine years ago.

The amateur half of that evidence is the part we expect to be attacked, and readers should know it has held up before: our vault's [[PX-2191]] rests on two private notebooks kept by an air-traffic controller and a boiler engineer, and their arithmetic beat a defence ministry's by twenty-six hours.

Thirty-one observers, nineteen countries, thirty-two years. Nobody paid them either.

## Sources (invented)

- Dr. Yusuf Aranda-Mbeki, Celestial mechanician, Cape Town; run A — Commissioned; given the observation set and told it was a piece of launch debris of unrecorded origin. Debriefed and told the truth on 2 August 2026. (May–August 2026)
- Prof. Ilaria Venturoli-Grimshaw, Orbital dynamicist, Padua; run D — Commissioned and primed identically. Debriefed 2 August 2026 and replied at length the same week; her reply runs unedited below. (May–August 2026)
- Dr. Song-hee Baptiste-Kwan, Astrodynamicist, Montréal; run B — Commissioned and told only that the positions were real, the epochs were real, and that she should not attempt to identify the object (May–August 2026)
- Dr. Fenella Okonjo-Strand, Astrodynamicist, Uppsala; run C — Commissioned blind on identical terms; supplied the tightest formal covariance of the four and the only run repeated end to end on different hardware (May–August 2026)
- The amateur optical archive, 1994–2025, 2,412 positions on the same object from 31 observers in nineteen countries — Collected from published observer circulars and private plate logs; every observer traced, 27 of the 31 reached and consenting, four deceased (Compiled January–April 2026)

## Documents cited (invented)

- PX-2191: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-2191

## What we could not confirm

- What the object was doing 13,000 years ago. The four runs do not disagree past 12,940 years — they stop. That is a statement about the reach of our arithmetic and not about the object, and any account of where it came from lies on the far side of a wall we cannot presently get over. Better observations, or the release of the withheld optical frames, would move the wall; nothing else will.
- The area-to-mass ratio is a ceiling, not a measurement. It is derived from the fact that the orbit has not decayed across a full solar maximum, which bounds the ratio from above and says nothing about shape. A very large, very light object that was also perfectly attitude-stable could in principle sit under the same ceiling. Three of the four dynamicists say that combination is not physical. The fourth, Okonjo-Strand, says only that it is unlikely, and we print her word rather than theirs.
- The astrometric uncertainty on the 2,412 amateur positions. The observers did not record one, so we assigned 1.4 arcseconds from the residual scatter and published the assignment with the data. If we are wrong by a factor of two the horizon moves by about 800 years. It does not change sign, and we have not found an assumption that makes it change sign, which is not the same as there being none.

## Right of reply

**Prof. Ilaria Venturoli-Grimshaw, orbital dynamicist, Padua; author of run D** (Replied 7 August 2026. Printed in full and unedited, at her insistence and against our sub-editor's preference for cuts.):

> You lied to me about the provenance and you did not need to. My number would have been the same. I want that sentence at the top because everything else I am going to say is a complaint, and I do not want the complaint mistaken for a retraction.
> 
> Here is what your deception actually bought you. It did not remove my expectations; it replaced them with yours. A person told 'launch debris' does not become neutral. She becomes a person fitting launch debris, and she reaches for the models that fit launch debris — in my case a solar-radiation-pressure treatment calibrated on aluminium fragments, which is exactly the wrong instrument for a body with the ratio this one turns out to have. My run is the longest of the four and I believe that is why. You did not de-bias me. You biased me in a direction you chose and then published the result as though it had emerged from nowhere.
> 
> If you wanted a blind analysis you should have run one properly: a protocol registered before the data moved, a fifth participant who knew the design and audited it, and salted controls — three fake objects among the real one, so that agreement means something. You had the money. You paid us handsomely and you rented compute for a fortnight. What you did not do was spend anything on the possibility that we would all be wrong together, and four people arriving at the same wrong answer is not a rarer event than one person arriving at it.
> 
> Now the part you will like less than the part above.
> 
> The result stands. I have re-run my fit with a radiation-pressure model appropriate to the ratio and it moves my horizon from 13,091 years to 12,902. It moves toward the others. It does not move toward zero, it does not move toward 1957, and there is no assumption available to me — not the amateur astrometry, not the geopotential order, not the lunar ephemeris, not the drag model at any plausible density — that brings a bounded, non-decaying solution anywhere near the space age. I have spent three weeks trying to break it, partly out of temper, and I could not.
> 
> What I will not sign is your sentence. You write that the orbit 'predates every rocket by roughly twelve thousand nine hundred years'. The orbit does not predate anything. An orbit is not an object with a birthday; it is a description of a motion, and a back-integration that survives to a given year tells you that the motion is consistent with having existed then. Consistent with. Those two words are doing more work than your headline allows them to do, and you should have hired a fifth person to say so before I did.
> 
> I am not withdrawing my figure and I do not want another commission from you.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.