The intrepid spacecraft will cross a major distance milestone in November 2026. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Voyager 1 is one of humanity's most poignant and remarkable technological achievements. Over the course of its nearly half century odyssey, the probe has glimpsed the gas giant Saturn, passed the threshold for interstellar space, and continually sets the bar for our furthest traveling human-made object. But based on NASA's projections, Voyager 1 is less than a year away from reaching yet another milestone.

Information on the web, such as scientific publications and Wikipedia, often surpasses users' reading level. To help address this, we used a self-refinement approach to develop a LLM capability for minimally lossy text simplification. To validate our approach, we conducted a randomized study involving 4563 participants and 31 texts spanning 6 broad subject areas: PubMed (biomedical scientific articles), biology, law, finance, literature/philosophy, and aerospace/computer science. Participants were randomized to viewing original or simplified texts in a subject area, and answered multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that tested their comprehension of the text. The participants were also asked to provide qualitative feedback such as task difficulty. Our results indicate that participants who read the simplified text answered more MCQs correctly than their counterparts who read the original text (3.9% absolute increase, p<0.05). This gain was most striking with PubMed (14.6%), while more moderate gains were observed for finance (5.5%), aerospace/computer science (3.8%) domains, and legal (3.5%). Notably, the results were robust to whether participants could refer back to the text while answering MCQs. The absolute accuracy decreased by up to ~9% for both original and simplified setups where participants could not refer back to the text, but the ~4% overall improvement persisted. Finally, participants' self-reported perceived ease based on a simplified NASA Task Load Index was greater for those who read the simplified text (absolute change on a 5-point scale 0.33, p<0.05). This randomized study, involving an order of magnitude more participants than prior works, demonstrates the potential of LLMs to make complex information easier to understand. Our work aims to enable a broader audience to better learn and make use of expert knowledge available on the web, improving information accessibility.

This paper investigates the suitability of frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) for Q&A interactions in science centres, with the aim of boosting visitor engagement while maintaining factual accuracy. Using a dataset of questions collected from the National Space Centre in Leicester (UK), we evaluated responses generated by three leading models: OpenAI's GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google Gemini 1.5. Each model was prompted for both standard and creative responses tailored to an 8-year-old audience, and these responses were assessed by space science experts based on accuracy, engagement, clarity, novelty, and deviation from expected answers. The results revealed a trade-off between creativity and accuracy, with Claude outperforming GPT and Gemini in both maintaining clarity and engaging young audiences, even when asked to generate more creative responses. Nonetheless, experts observed that higher novelty was generally associated with reduced factual reliability across all models. This study highlights the potential of LLMs in educational settings, emphasizing the need for careful prompt engineering to balance engagement with scientific rigor.

Voyager 1 is still alive out there, barreling into the cosmos more than 15 billion miles away. However, a computer problem has kept the mission's loyal support team in Southern California from knowing much more about the status of one of NASA's longest-lived spacecraft. The computer glitch cropped up on November 14, and it affected Voyager 1's ability to send back telemetry data, such as measurements from the craft's science instruments or basic engineering information about how the probe was doing. As a result, the team has no insight into key parameters regarding the craft's propulsion, power, or control systems. "It would be the biggest miracle if we get it back. We certainly haven't given up," said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an interview with Ars.

Forty years ago, NASA launched twin robotic explorers on a mission to travel farther out than any spacecraft had gone before, and today, they continue to be our most distant emissaries. The story of those probes, and of the people behind them, is the focus of the aptly-titled documentary, "The Farthest," airing Wednesday (Aug. The Voyager probes, referred to by numerical designators "1" and "2," revealed the outer planets of our solar system and then continued to sail beyond. Voyager 2, which was the first to launch on Aug. 20, 1977, visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 departed Earth on Sep. 5, 1977, overtook its counterpart, and was the first to arrive at Jupiter and Saturn.

When viewed on a cosmic scale, humanity lives on a tiny grain of sand floating in an unimaginably-deep ocean. Huge expanses of space separate even the closest stars, ensuring that, should any sufficiently intelligent life form want to spread across the galaxy, it would take a momentous effort to launch across the interstellar seas. As we look toward the stars, hoping that we may visit them some day, many would argue that interstellar travel is impossible. After all, the nearest-known star system is over 4 light-years away. Let's think about that for a moment: It takes light 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the sun's surface to our planet's atmosphere.