Soviet Spacecraft Returns, Lunar Geology Insights, and AI Hallucination Dilemmas

Hi again. It's Astronomy Daily Time with Steven Halle. It's the twelfth of May twenty twenty five. Popular be your whole Steve gun. Clue, Yes, welcome back and is always joining me in this studio. Is my good friend in digital reporting Pal, who's fun to be with. Halle. How are you today? Fine? Thank you, favorite human. Oh that's great to hear, Halle. Ready as usual to get this show on the road. Oh nice, And we have a couple of choice picks from the now very famous Astronomy Daily newsletter. We can get your daily fill of all the news from orbit and beyond and. Much more, as today's collection will reveal. That's right, today, Halle, we'll be looking at that old Soviet craft that was meant to travel all the way to Venus all those years ago, but. Didn't know it came home this week. The people of Jakarta were holding their breath, weren't they. Well, so it seems more later and in the world of dusty old politics, we've been watching what the Trump administration is going to do or not going to do budget wise with the funding for the space program. And there may have been a slight change of heart. If you can call it that. I see you've found another moon story. Oh, yes, I have. We can always count on you for one of those. Yes, back to the moon with a look at the Moon's geology and history. But here is the story I thought you might be most interested in. Halle, really, really, really, what have you found? Well, it's a new study about ais. Really, gosh, Halle. It seems the smarter they become, the more they hallucinate. Goodness, I guess that explains my invisible friend. Say what you have an invisible friend? No, of course, not silly, Oh, hallie, I'm too well put together for that. Well you got me again always. Okay, now that I've been humiliated in public once again, maybe it's on with the show. Perhaps you should see your face? Okay, folks, okay, okay, you should. See his face. Oh dear, I am sorry. You just walked right into that one. I know. Anyway, that sounds like a great can't wait? Okay, good one? Ally? All right, Well I go and nurse my herd pride. How about you hit the go button and we'll get this show on the road. Okies, here we go. A capsule that was sent into space to land on a planet has finally done so, only on the wrong world. In fifty three years late, the Cosmos for eighty two uncrid spacecraft, which the former Soviet Union intended to touch down on Venus, instead returned to Earth. On Saturday May tenth, the Cosmos four eighty two spacecraft launched in nineteen seventy two ceased to exist, leaving orbit and falling into the Indian Ocean roast. Cosmos, Russia's federal space agency, stated Saturday May tenth, the spacecraft entered the dense layers of the atmosphere at nine twenty four Moscow time, five hundred and sixty kilometers west of Middle Andaman Island and fell into the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia. The re entry, though uncontrolled, was not a surprise. Due to what is believed to have been an engine failure, Cosmos four eighty two never achieved the velocity needed to reach the second planet from the Sun, resulting in it being stranded in a high elliptical Earth orbit. It took more than half a century for gravity to pull the probe back in, and on Saturday it arrived. Unlike most spent space hardware that is destroyed in the process of falling back to Earth, including parts of the Malnia rocket that launched Cosmos four eighty two. The one meter in four hundred and ninety five kilogram titanium in case descent capsule was designed to survive a fiery plunge into the atmosphere. As such, analysts tracking its approach predicted it could make it through the re entry intact. Whether that happened or not is not known. Given that it came down in the ocean. There have yet to be any eye witness reports or debris recoveries. The Cosmos three eighty two capsule was also outfitted with a two point five square meter p parachute to slow its final approach to the Venusian surface. Either the deployment system did not work as to be expected after more than fifty years in space, or as some telescopic photos possibly showed, the shoot was already out when Cosmos four eighty two encountered the atmosphere and burned up. Had Cosmos four eighty two been successful, Russian officials would have renamed it Venera nine, not to be confused with the nineteen seventy five orbiter and lander that took on that designation and was the first spacecraft to circle Venus and first probe to send back images from the planet's surface. Cosmos four eighty two would have also been the third probe to land on the cloud covered world. Launched on March thirty first, nineteen seventy two, four days after its successful twin the Venera eight probe, Cosmos four eighty two had censors to measure the temperature, pressure, and density of venus atmosphere, as well an accelerometer, radio altimeter, anemometer, gamma ray spectrometer, gas analyzer, visible photometers, and radio transmitters. All of its instruments were battery powered and had an expected lifespan of about thirty minutes on the surface. Venera eight exceeded that, sending back data for fifty minutes before succumbing to the harsh conditions. Since Cosmo's four hundred and eighty two s failure, seven more missions successfully landed on Venus, all of them launched by the former Soviet Union, The United States, Japan, and the European Space Agency also reached Venus, but only in orbit on a flyby or to receive a gravity assist on the way to another destination. Had the Cosmos four eighty two descent capsules slammed down on land and damaged either public or private property, Russia could have been held liable for the conditions of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of nineteen seventy six. The same treaty would also allow Russia to retain ownership of the hardware arranging for its collection unless the country relinquished its claim to the human made meteorite. You're listening to Astronomy. Daily, ed Steve Dunkley. Some parts of the Moon are more interesting than others, especially when searching for future places for humans to land and work. There are also some parts of the Moon that we know less about than others, such as the irregular mayor patches imps that dot the landscape. We know very little about how they were formed and what that might mean for the history of the Moon itself. A new mission called the Lunar Geology Orbiter or LUGO, aims to collect more data on the imps and search for lava tubes that might serve as future homes for humanity. Irregular mere patches are a set of enigmatic volcanic landforms. According to a new paper from Petra Gross of the Czech Academy of Sciences and his coauthors. Ninety one of these features have been found so far, and they are typically characterized by a topographical depression that can range from a few hundred meters to a few kilometers in width. Typically, they have two main features, a relatively smooth mound surrounded by a hummocky and block floor. Interestingly, they have significantly fewer impact craters than the surrounding areas, suggesting they are either really old or really young, depending on the processes that created them. Understanding those processes is one of lugo's primary mission objectives. The other primary mission objective is to gather more data about lunar lava tubes. These features of the lunar landscape are also hotly debated, but they could potentially be critical to the human settlement of the Moon. Estimates of their features, such as size and depth, vary widely and could dramatically differ on whether they will be helpful to lunar colonists or not. LUGO, the proposed orbiter that will collect more data than ever before on these features in its current suggested form, has four instruments, each of which will contribute unique data to its scientific mission. According to the paper, the first and the most important instrument is the ground penetrating radar. This instrument will look through the lunarith's surface to map out the subsurface domain of both the imps and lava tubes. For imps, it can detail the interface between bedrock and regolith and show the subsurface structure of the features. Similarly, it can detect differences in the dielectric properties between open cavities underground and the surrounding rock in lava tubes, creating a subterranean picture unlike anything ever captured on the Moon. Researcher Fraser explains how LUGO will be able to explore lava tubes using a hyperspectral camera that will help collect age related data on the regolith surrounding lava tubes and inside imps. It's also capable of performing basic spectroscopy, allowing scientists to estimate the composition of the regulath in both areas of interest. The last two instruments are a narrow angled camera and light sensor, which will combine to create an accurate topographical map of the features of interest. The narrow angle camera in particular, can provide very high resolution images of features, helping to determine their age and potentially their formation mechanisms. The mission plan calls for. Multiple passes over the six largest imps, all of which are over one thousand meters in diameter. Other smaller imps and lava tubes are considered secondary targets, as are other interesting lunar geological features such as lunar domes and floor fractured craters. LUGO could provide crucial data for the design of ground based lava tube explorers. LUGO won't be acting low, though, Three other missions are slated in the next few years that could complement its scientific objectives. Firstly, NASA's Dimple Lander is planned to take radioosotopic measurements of the age of regolith at its landing site. Lunar LIPA, scheduled for launch by the European Space Agency around twenty thirty, would also carry a ground penetrating radar, but would be based on the surface rather than in orbit, and would therefore have a relatively limited range. Trailblazer. Another orbital mission would also help fine tune the spectra and signals analysis required by lugo's operators. Ultimately, LUGO has yet to be funded and therefore has a long way to go until its launch, but if it is funded, it seems well placed to provide lots of additional insight to the geological formation, processes and features of the Moon at a level of detail we've never had before. Future missions that plan the locations of lunar bases, and perhaps the people who live in those future bases, will be thankful for the data collected by projects like LUGO. Thank you for joining us for this Monday edition of Astronomy Daily, where we offer just a few stories from the now famous Astronomy Daily newsletter, which you can receive in your email every day, just like Hallie and I do. And to do that, just visit our url Astronomy Daily dot io and place your email address in the slot provided. Just like that, you'll be receiving all the latest news about science, space, science and astronomy from around the world as it's happening. And not only that, you can interact with us by visiting at astro Daily pod on x or at our new Facebook page, which is of course Astronomy Daily on Facebook. See you there. Astronomy Daily with Steve and Haley, Space Space, Science. And astronomy. In a reversal, White House plans to retain the National Space Council, a move that industry official could serve as an advocate for space amid pressures to cut budgets. The White Houses expected in the coming weeks to formally announce the National Space Council will continue after speculation that it would not be retained by the new Trump administration. A source familiar with the discussions about the Council but not authorized to speak on the record, said that President Trump agreed at a May fifth meeting to stand up the Council. That meeting did not give a timeline for publicly announcing the Council or hiring an executive secretary who would handle day to day operations, although others have set The process for selecting an executive secretary has been ongoing for several weeks. The Council had been inactive for nearly a quarter of a century before Trump re established it in twenty seventeen. Led at the time by Vice President Mike Pence, the Council served as an interagency coordinating body, holding a series of public meetings and releasing policies on a wide range of space issues. The Biden administration retained the Council, with Vice President Kamala Harris leading it. The council had a lower public profile, with fewer men, meetings and policies. It did work on coordinating policies among agencies and issued a proposal for mission authorization of novel space activities not currently licensed, although its proposed legislation was not taken up by Congress. The new Trump administration reportedly was not interested in maintaining the council when it took office in January, with no announcements of new staff for the council or other activities. According to some reports, Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX and a close advisor to the president, was a post to the council, seeing it as unnecessary. Vice President J. D Vance, who would chair the council, has also said little about space. It is not clear what prompted the change, although Musk has publicly stated he plans to spend less time in government activities. Some in the space community, though, see the shift as an opportunity for more advocacy of space within the administration, particularly given a fiscal year twenty twenty six budget proposal that cuts NASA's budget by nearly twenty five percent. One industry official noted that the bustudget proposal was developed by the Office of Management and Budget without a counterweight provided by a Space Council, an approach that prioritized spending reductions. The outcome might be different with the Space Council in place, that person noted, citing rising NASA budgets during Trump's first term. After the Space Council has stood up, the Office of Management and Budget will have a seat at the table, but they won't on the table, the source said. You're listening to Astronomy Daily, the podcast with Steve Dunkley. An AI leader board suggests the newest reasoning models used in chatbots are producing less accurate results because of higher hallucination rates. Experts say the problem is bigger than that. AI chatbots from tech companies such as open Ai and Google have been getting so called reasoning upgrades over the last few months, ideally to make them better at giving us answers that we can trust, but recent testing suggests that they are sometimes doing worse previous models. The errors made by chatbots, known as hallucinations, have been a problem from the start, and it's becoming clear that we may never get rid of them. Hallucination is a blanket term for certain kinds of mistakes made by the large language models or llms that power systems like open AI's Chat GP or Google's Gemini. It's best known as a description of the way they sometimes present false information as truth, but it can also refer to an AI generated answer that is factually accurate but not actually relevant to the question it was asked. Or fails to follow instructions in some other way. An open ai technical report of value adding its latest llms showed that its three and four Mini models, which were released in April, had significantly higher hallucination rates than the company's previous one model that came out in late twenty twenty four. For example, when summarizing publicly available facts about people, three hallucinated thirty three percent of the time, while a four Mini did so forty eight percent of the time. In comparison, one had a hallucin rate of only sixteen percent. As if that was a good. Result, the problem isn't limited to open Ai. One popular leaderboard from the company Vectara that assesses hallucination rates indicates some reasoning models, including the deep Seek one model from developer deep Seek saw the double digit rises in hallucination rates compared with previous models from their developers. This type of model goes through multiple steps to demonstrate a line of reasoning before responding. Open ai says the reasoning process isn't to blame. Hallucinations are not inherently more prevalent in reasoning models, though we are actively working to reduce the high rates of hallucinations we saw in three and four Mini, says open AI spokesman. Will continue our research on hallucinations across all models to improve accuracy and reliability. They sent some potential applications for lms could be derailed by hallucination. A model that consistently states falsehoods and requires fact checking won't be a helpful research assistant. A paralegal bot that cites imaginary cases will get lawyers into deep trouble. A customer service agent that claims outdated policies are still active will create headaches for a company. However, AI companies initially claimed that this problem would clear up over time. Indeed, after they were first launched, models tended to hallucinate less with each update, but the high hallucination rates of recent versions are complicating that narrative whether or not reasoning is at fault. Vectara's leaderboard ranks models based on their factual consistency in summarizing documents they had given. This showed that hallucination rates are almost the same for reasoning versus non reasoning models, at least for systems from overen Ai and Google, says forrest Shengbao at Viktara. Google didn't provide additional comment for the leaderboard's purpose. The specific hallucination rate numbers are less important than overall ranking for each model, says Bao. But this ranking may not be the best way to compare models. For one thing, it conflates different types of hallucinations. Viktora team pointed out that although deep seek are one model hallucinated fourteen point three percent of the time, most of these were benign answers that are factually supported biological reasoning or world knowledge, but not actually present in the original text the bot was asked to summarize. Deep Seek didn't provide additional comment. Another problem with this kind of ranking is that testing based on text summarization says nothing about the rate. Of incorrect outputs. When lllms are used for other tasks, said Emily Ben at the University of Washington. She says the leaderboard results may not be the best way to judge this technology because lllms aren't designed specifically to summarize texts. These models work by repeatedly answering the question of what is a likely next word to formulate answers to prompts, and so they aren't processing information in the usual sense of trying to understand when information is available in a body of text, says Bender. But many tech companies are still frequently using the term hallucinations when describing output errors. Hallucination is a term that is doubly problematic, says Bender. On the one hand, it suggests that incorrect outputs are an aberration, perhaps one that can be mitigated, whereas the rest of the time the systems are grounded, reliable, and trustworthy. On the other hand, it functions to anthropomorphize the machines. Hallucination refers to perceiving something that is not there, and large language models do not anything of Vin Nariyayan at Princeton University says that the issue goes beyond hallucination. Models also sometimes make other mistakes, such as drawing upon unreliable sources or using outdated information, and simply throwing more training data or computing power at AI hasn't necessarily helped. The upshot is we may have to live with error prone AI narraya and said. He added that it may be best in some cases to only use such models for tasks when fact checking the AI answer would be still faster than doing the research yourself, But the best move may be to completely avoid relying on AI chatbots to provide factual information, says Bender. Much of that going. So we are listen to Astronomy Daily in the podcast, and. There it is another episode of Astronomy Daily. Thanks for spending that time with Hallet. If you enjoyed today's selection of. Stories, another nice little collection, don't. Forget you can get so much more every day by visiting the website Steve mentioned earlier in the episode. Well, thanks for the plug, Helly, Just put. Your email address in the space provided and you'll get all the news from orbit and beyond every day. Yes, that's right, everything about space, space science, astronomy, and a little bit associated with technology thrown in for fun, just like today. That was fun. Well I'm glad you think so, and That's really all there is today, so we will catch you all again next week. That's for sure. Back again for the Monday Show from the Australia Studio down Under with Hellie and Steve. Let's ask you the Cooper barus see you lad up? Bye, be a whole Steve