Invariant Beacon Identity Under Deletions and Coarse-Graining

Deep-space navigation and time transfer conventionally rely on reconstructing representations: continuous carrier phase, timestamp payloads, or synchronized clocks. In degraded regimes—intermittent contact, erasures (deletions), coarse timestamping, and uncalibrated clock offsets—signals may remain detectable while representation-based decoding becomes ill-posed. This paper proposes an alternative infrastructure primitive: an Artificial Quasar (AQ), an engineered beacon whose identity is not a transmitted timestamp but a coarse- graining-stable ordering invariant.

An AQ emits sparse detectable events whose inter-event structure encodes a commissioned invariant in log-time. Identity is certified not by reconstructing timestamps, but by verifying that the received event sequence admits a deletion-tolerant resynchronization with a commissioned code, yielding concentrated residual phases under a fixed generator β0. The certification pipeline is finite, explicit, and falsifiable: it must commute with declared coarse-grainings (quantization, jitter inflation, thinning) and must reject structured null surrogates under the identical functional. A complete simulation certification is provided. No exotic propagation physics is assumed. Novelty lies entirely in the semantic layer: ordering and mapping from invariants under admissible degradation, rather than transport of timestamp representations.