The failure in navigation has been ascribed to an out-of-adjustment celestial navigation instrument, a bubble octant, that gave a systematic bias to all of its readings.
One might expect from the preceding statements that there could be up to eight lobes, one in each octant of space which has been divided by the coordinate planes.
These algorithms involve calculating a full quadrant of the ellipse, as opposed to an octant as explained above, since non-circular ellipses lack the x-y symmetry of a circle.
