No error was raised: twenty-six broken measurements from a cross-domain audit of free satellite data

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Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-09-16
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22788700
Primary Topic
Space exploration and regulation
Type
preprint
Controls
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preprint

No error was raised: twenty-six broken measurements from a cross-domain audit of free satellite data

Boss Ohkubo
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Space exploration and regulation
preprint

No error was raised: twenty-six broken measurements from a cross-domain audit of free satellite data

Boss Ohkubo
preprint en

Abstract

Published work on satellite applications is, with few exceptions, a collection of successes. What free Earth observation cannot do, and where the attempt to measure whether it can do it breaks down, is largely absent from the record. This preprint reports a cross-domain audit built to close that gap, and its main finding is about the audit rather than about satellites. Fifteen advertised industrial applications of satellite data were implemented in full, fixed to a single region so that results are comparable, and run on free, unauthenticated data only. All fifteen completed. Nine were then scored against reference solutions the authors cannot move: awarded national-government contracts — each with a title, a contracting body and a contract value — recovered from thirteen fiscal years of Japanese procurement open data (312,584 records, of which 332 are satellite analysis or survey work). The remaining six were not measured because the state does not buy them. Four industries returned zero analysis contracts in 312,584 records, and two were artefacts of keyword matching. The fifteen-row application table was a claim about demand, not a description of it. Seven technical walls and four institutional walls are reported, and only one of the seven is bought off with money. The name first given to that one — resolution — proved imprecise, because the commercial sensor that would cross it changes pixel size and band count together, so what is being bought cannot be separated. Two walls are properties of the measuring instrument rather than of the method: a free analysis-ready SAR product that has already discarded phase, and a thermal sensor whose overpass time has been drifting since orbit maintenance ended in February 2020, bending a night-time land-surface-temperature trend from +0.083 to +0.812 K/yr and contaminating every year to be compared. One is not a technical wall at all: a satellite quantity can be measured correctly and still add nothing, because the target statistic is already explained by population at r = 0.85 to 0.95. The core of the paper is a ledger of twenty-six occasions on which the measurement itself was broken. Every one returned a plausible value without raising an error, and ten returned a good result. The asymmetry that bad results are doubted while good ones are not is identified as the central hazard of self-directed measurement: errors that hurt get fixed, errors that flatter get published, and no care applied after seeing a result corrects for it, because that care is allocated by the same asymmetry. The protocol therefore freezes a prediction, a decision criterion and a counter-hypothesis before each run, so that a confirmed prediction triggers an audit rather than a conclusion; twice, that is the only reason a defect was caught. Four recurring shapes are recorded, and a tally of what actually caught the defects is given with its members listed so that it can be checked: reading a primary document in full and counting a denominator, a unit or a sample size account for twelve of the twenty-six between them, and neither requires any satellite data. Aggregate statistics found almost none — every defect was already producing a reasonable aggregate. Limits are stated before findings. The wall taxonomy kept changing as industries were added and there is no basis for calling it complete at seven; institutional reach rests on a single observed rejection; the region is fixed and in at least one industry the region determines the conclusion; "zero procurement" means zero in central-government competitive tendering, not zero in existence; and the ledger is a lower bound, since a defect that produced a plausible value and was never contradicted is by construction still in the results. 本稿は英語本文と日本語完全版の両方を収録している。衛星データ用途15業種を福岡に固定して全部実装し、国の落札実績13年度分・312,584件から参照解を引いて9業種の到達度を測った記録。技術の壁7種・制度の壁4種、そして測り方が壊れていた26件の台帳。 Preprint. Not peer reviewed. The implementation, the frozen predictions and verdicts, and the full ledger are archived separately as eisei-bench and listed in the related identifiers.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
JFE Holdings (Japan) (JP)
Space exploration and regulation
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