NASA's newest six-wheeled robot on Mars, the Perseverance rover, is beginning an epic journey across a crater floor seeking signs of ancient life. That means the rover team is deeply engaged with planning navigation routes, drafting instructions to be beamed up, even donning special 3D glasses to help map their course.

But increasingly, the rover will take charge of the drive by itself, using a powerful auto-navigation system. Called AutoNav, this enhanced system makes 3D maps of the terrain ahead, identifies hazards, and plans a route around any obstacles without additional direction from controllers back on Earth.

"We have a capability called 'thinking while driving,'" said Vandi Verma, a senior engineer, rover planner, and driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

This image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts the open star cluster NGC 330, which lies around 180,000 light-years away inside the Small Magellanic Cloud. The cluster—which is in the constellation Tucana (the Toucan)—contains a multitude of stars, many of which are scattered across this striking image.

Because star clusters form from a single primordial cloud of gas and dust, all the stars they contain are roughly the same age. This makes them useful natural laboratories for astronomers to learn how stars form and evolve. This image uses observations from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and incorporates data from two very different astronomical investigations. The first aimed to understand why stars in star clusters appear to evolve differently from stars elsewhere, a peculiarity first observed with Hubble. The second aimed to determine how large stars can be before they become doomed to end their lives in cataclysmic supernova explosions.

Hubble images show us something new about the universe.

Researchers from the National Time Service Center (NTSC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have proposed a new method to realize absolute calibration of multi-mode satellite navigation receiver delay.

The new method can be applied to fields like navigation positioning, satellite timing, and time transfer, increasing user positioning and timing accuracy.

The calibration of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver delay poses a technology difficulty in the field of satellite navigation. The widely used relative calibration method can only obtain the delay difference between a tested receiver and a reference receiver.

However, fields like GNSS time offset monitoring, satellite timing technology and satellite-ground time synchronization need absolute calibration.

NTSC researchers used satellite simulator hardware and high-speed oscilloscope to completely calibrate all kinds of GNSS receiver delay, with the calibration accuracy better than 1.5ns(1σ).

An atomic clock provided reference frequency for all equipment. Testing Time-to-Code (TtC) by the oscilloscope was used to calibrate the simulator delay, and the channel delay could be calculated by the pseudorange, 1and PPS output delay measured by a time interval counter.

Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson is aiming to beat fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos into space by nine days.

Sixty years after joining a private program with the hope of one day becoming an astronaut, US pilot Wally Funk will finally see her dream come true at age 82.

On Thursday, Amazon's billionaire founder Jeff Bezos invited her to join him on his spaceflight company Blue Origin's July 20 launch.

The flight will not just make her the oldest person ever to travel in space, but also a walking, breathing symbol of the rewards of audacity and perseverance.

"I like to do things that nobody's ever done," she said in a video posted on Instagram by Bezos.

Mercury 13

Funk grew up in the western United States in Taos, New Mexico. As a child she was passionate about aviation and took her first flying lesson at age nine. In high school, she was barred from taking mechanics, a subject reserved for boys.

Such rules did not prevent her from obtaining a pilot's license and graduating from Oklahoma State University, known for its aviation program. By now she has logged 19,600 hours of flight time.

At the very beginning of the 1960s she joined a privately-funded, innovative flight program called Mercury 13—which put women through the same training and tests as the male astronauts undergoing the official NASA program.