LQ8: Cassini and Mercury metric attempt, 5 September 2026

Result: conditional compatibility with published marginal constraints;
the explicit metric extension FAILS its local scalar stability diagnostic.
The added metric/foliation sector is not derived from the LQ8 Hamiltonian.
No raw spacecraft data or new ephemeris fit is provided.

Use Python 3.12 with the scientific dependencies in requirements.txt.
Run from this extracted directory:
  python verify_inputs.py
  python -B -W error dark_mercury_check.py
  python -B -W error dark_joint_solar.py

The latter writes outputs/dark_joint_solar/summary.json and two CSV files.
Compare with expected/joint-summary.json. No Rust build or new solar PDE
solve is needed: the previous Q2 calculations are frozen inputs here.
The response and 46 archived shapes are re-evaluated by the diagnostic.
Run verify_inputs.py before reproduction, since generated reports are inputs.

Study notes contain links to earlier workspace documents; those broader
studies are available at https://emergent-gravity.com/observations/ .
Observational summaries are correlated; no combined chi-squared is claimed.
