Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

TIL: James Cassidy of Information Society is a soil scientist at OSU

Dragonfly, the first-of-its-kind rotorcraft to explore another world, will fly to various locations on Saturn’s moon Titan and investigate the moon’s habitability.

After a seven-month cruise to Mars and six months of aerobraking to reach its science orbit, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter began seeking out the history of water on Mars with its science instruments. The instruments zoom in for extreme close-up photography of the martian surface, analyze minerals, look for subsurface water, trace how much dust and water are distributed in the atmosphere, and monitor daily global weather. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission met all its science goals in a two-year primary science phase. Two extensions, the latest beginning in 2010, have added to the bounty of science returns.

The Saturn V was a rocket NASA built to send people to the moon. The Saturn V was a type of rocket called a Heavy Lift Vehicle. That means it was very powerful. It was the most powerful rocket that had ever flown successfully. The Saturn V was used in the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s. It also was used to launch the Skylab space station.

The twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched by NASA in separate months in the summer of 1977 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. As originally designed, the Voyagers were to conduct closeup studies of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn's rings, and the larger moons of the two planets. After making a string of discoveries there, such as active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and intricacies of Saturn's rings, the mission was extended. Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets.

For more than a decade, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shared the wonders of Saturn and its family of icy moons. It took us to astounding worlds where methane rivers run to a methane sea and where jets of ice and gas are blasting material into space from a liquid water ocean that might harbor the ingredients for life.

The International Space Station's 3D printer has manufactured the first 3D printed object in space, paving the way to future long-term space expeditions.

On April 25, 1990, astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery deployed the Hubble Space Telescope into Earth orbit, and launched a new era of astronomical discovery. Now, 25 years later, we celebrate a remarkable milestone for a space observatory whose ground-breaking investigations have brought revolutionary changes in our understanding from planets, stars, nebulae, and galaxies to the very frontiers of the cosmos.

Hubble, the observatory, is the first major optical telescope to be placed in space, the ultimate mountaintop. Above the distortion of the atmosphere, far far above rain clouds and light pollution, Hubble has an unobstructed view of the universe. Scientists have used Hubble to observe the most distant stars and galaxies as well as the planets in our solar system. Hubble's launch and deployment in April 1990 marked the most significant advance in astronomy since Galileo's telescope. Our view of the universe and our place within it has never been the same.

But the LLMs we use are not just base models. They are post-trained, and a key part of modern post-training is reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). During pre-training, the model learns only from sequences that already exist in the training data. During RLVR, the model explores by generating new sequences and learning from their outcomes

A project overdue. As an 80's/90's kid, I was obsessed with printing technology - and especially halftone patterns. I've long theorized that these pat