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I believe, for the purposes of these pages, we usually count interplanetary launches as heliocentric to avoid having to clarify every time and make sorting the statistics easier. There are a couple of instances where planetary orbiters are listed with their final orbit, not their launch orbit. Why is this inconsistent for this page? Cheers! UnknownM1 (talk) 16:45, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Usually the target orbit of the spacecraft is given (see e.g. all the geosynchronous satellites, they are nearly always launched to a transfer orbit). The statistics are going by the initial orbit where the spacecraft separates from the launch vehicle. For interplanetary missions we have some strange mix - sometimes even within one month. --mfb (talk) 00:54, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I would at least attempt to keep consistency within pages. We can revise it to make it consistent. I would personally lean towards initial orbit, not final orbit. UnknownM1 (talk) 02:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Then nearly all the GEO satellites would have to be moved to geostationary transfer orbit. We are talking about >1000 changes if we take that seriously, and we would have to check the details in every case. I think the final orbit is more interesting in most cases. --mfb (talk) 02:50, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
