The solar system is the best-ranged laboratory in existence, and its ledger carries small unpaid items. Decades of planetary radar, spacecraft transponders, and lunar laser ranging constrain the ephemerides to meters across billions of kilometers, and within that precision several anomalous residuals have come and gone or come and stayed: the astronomical unit's reported secular increase (Krasinsky and Brumberg 2004: about 15 meters per century, significant at their stated errors, never satisfactorily explained and quietly absorbed when the AU was redefined as a constant in 2012); the flyby anomalies, unexplained velocity jumps of millimeters per second during Earth gravity assists, prominent in the 1990s-2000s encounters, diminished but not understood since; and the persistent need to fit empirical secular terms in high-precision ephemerides whose physical origin is bookkept rather than derived. Each item is small, each contested, and each sits in data so precise that "small" still means orders of magnitude above measurement noise.
The standard treatment is administrative: the AU redefinition retired its drift by decree, flyby anomalies await better tracking, empirical terms absorb what theory does not predict, and the possibility that the residual family carries systematic physics, some secular evolution of the local gravitational environment itself, is not entertained because the standard framework offers no mechanism for one. Solar mass loss and tidal physics are modeled; beyond them, the local metric is assumed static apart from known dynamics.
The standing is a quiet ledger awaiting unification: ranging precision improves continuously (BepiColombo, Mars orbiters, next-generation LLR), the residual items persist at their small scales, and any framework predicting a specific secular drift rate for bound orbits has, in this dataset, the most precise test bench physics owns.