This reminds me of the Technology Connections fridge rant video. Similar arguments all around, the dumping effect of cold out of a vertical fridge is pretty crazy to watch with a thermal camera.
Seems like a generally good idea, the satellites already need to use star trackers, they need an almanac of what should be there so deviations need to be tracked.
I can entirely see the military perspective though, this is almost a direct challenge for any adversary that any maneuver you perform, we will know about it.
That could very well be what the quantum uncertainty principal is, floating point non deterministic errors. It also could just be drawing comparisons among different problem domains.
The Parker solar probe gets much closer than the solar orbiter, 0.046 AU vs 0.28 AU respectively. The successive Venus flybys are to drop it increasingly further into the sun's orbit to take solar atmospheric data on quick flybys while the Solar orbiter is more for spectrograph measurements of the sun's corona, just different mission sets.
But think about the corollary where places like McMasterCarr have exact products in known quantities, types and breakdowns because they used to be a catalogue. I will go to McMaster 9/10 times because it's just easy to find exactly what I want and so they get my money.
Amazon seems hostile to this very idea, that I know what I want, will spend 15% more to have it tomorrow and will not by the random stuff it smashes in the search results because I know what I want.
The conclusion is that the US just has more psychos. But the restraint of wrecking their vehicle to accost me holds them in line. On public transit they can accost me and nothing stops them.
Solar panels are themselves tiled by roundish wafers cut to make squares out of circles. To make them triangles throws away a different tiling advantage.