Flag repair verified; the registered NEOWISE quality gate still fails
14 October 2026. The human-authorized offline repair is complete. It uses the same 874 downloaded rows, three fixed cases and six alternatives, with zero new observation requests. Recognized two-character W1/W2 values and four-character W1/W2XX values expose the same W2 slot. Literal flags remain unchanged; no missing characters or bands are manufactured. All numerical cuts, geometry, duplicate checks, exposure joins, epoch grouping and the required 2/3 remain unchanged. The delivery/documentation discrepancy’s cause remains unknown.
Fifty valid synthetic encodings, fourteen malformed/null encodings and nine other quality boundary controls passed before repaired execution. The independent Decimal/vector checker, which imports neither the decoder nor producer, reproduced every native row and all counterpart counts. A separate raw-VO delta checker confirmed that 645 rows lose only the erroneous flag-shape rejection. Zero rows become accepted: every candidate extraction still has another rejection. All raw fields, IDs, positions, geometry and exposure joins remain exact.
| Fixed case | Native rows | Unique rows at best point | Accepted rows | Supported epochs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HIGALBM330.8814-0.3656 | 312 | 307 | 0 | 0 |
| HIGALBM351.2258+0.6937 | 273 | 75 | 0 | 0 |
| HIGALBM353.4272-0.3734 | 289 | 68 | 0 | 0 |
The corrected primary result is K=0/3, below required 2/3: the specified conservative pipeline-quality/cadence gate fails under the explicitly amended flag interpretation. Its verdict is now measured for this packet. That is not physical validation, a claim that all observations are intrinsically unusable, or evidence that the clumps contain no protostars. Other extraction methods, calibrated ownership, youth, population precision/recall and birth remain unknown.
The first and third best points fail reduced profile-fit chi-square in 307/307 and 68/68 matched rows. The second fails SNR in 61/75, profile fit in 24/75, image quality in 45/75, and the correctly decoded W2 grade in 60/75; these counts overlap. The separate red third alternative retains zero uniquely matched rows. It cannot inherit the blue point’s measurements. No model, feature, source identity, threshold, scientific population or physical truth changed.
This is a post-read repair on consumed data, not fresh evaluation or an outcome-blind experiment. The original computational readout and unresolved contract qualification remain intact historical attempts. Their null scientific verdict describes the state before this separately authorized repair. Current presentation must lead with the corrected measured failure and label the old null as historical. A parser fix has succeeded; the measurement route has failed.
Resource guards passed for permitted controls, analyzer, independent checker and delta audit; about 4.3 seconds of guarded execution, one CPU, 256 MiB sampled RSS ceiling and at least 48.34 GiB observed free. Sub-second workers mean RSS samples can miss most of their lifetime; do not advertise the sampled few MiB as an actual peak bound. The initial sandbox priority-setup refusal occurred before worker creation; its operational receipt is preserved separately. No science rerun, network retry, image request, fit, training or automatic successor follows.
The bounded repair unit stops here. The effective seven-day and long-term detector objectives remain unmet; the previous 333/800 control gate, no embedding gain, missing temporal support, colour and radio/gas limits stay visible. Atlas/E155/E121, N20/c6828 and the unmerged E29–E160 archive are untouched. Publication is separate from scientific success and needs its own exact deployment receipts.