Diagnostic Falsification of Legacy Orbital Propagators and the Tangential Force Release Operator

Current deep-space navigation protocols rely on empirical perturbation harmonics andrelativistic corrections to mitigate long-range orbital drift (e.g., flyby anomalies and thePioneer anomaly). This paper diagnoses the mathematical root of these cumulative errors.We demonstrate that the residual divergence in legacy propagators is not caused by unknowngravitational perturbations, but by the systemic omission of Tangential Force Release withinthe 3D-2D-3D fold-back mechanism. A deterministic engineering operator is provided topermanently patch existing navigation arrays. No prior literature is cited.