Ball Aerospace announced on Friday that the company has shipped the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Tropospheric Emission: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) spectrometer, an air quality monitoring instrument, to the spacecraft manufacturer for integration. Ball will work closely with NASA and the manufacturer to support spacecraft integration and testing. The TEMPO mission is scheduled to launch sometime in 2022.

"TEMPO is an apt name for this instrument, as it will make hourly daytime measurements of major air pollutants across North America. This rapid tempo of measurements will advance our understanding of pollution in the atmosphere from Mexico City to Canada and from coast to coast,” commented Dr. Makenzie Lystrup, vice president and general manager of Ball Aerospace’s Civil Space Business Unit.

The TEMPO spectrometer senses ultraviolet and visible light. It will make precise measurements of the critical constituents of air pollution, such as nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide and other atmospheric pollutants that impact human health and agricultural productivity. 

Ball finished developing the TEMPO instrument in 2018 and then delivered it to NASA Langley Research Center after a successful final acceptance review. The instrument was stored and maintained there until the spacecraft was ready for integration. 

The company has over four decades of experience in developing Earth-observing instruments. The TEMPO instrument was built in tandem with the Geostationary Environmental Monitoring Spectrometer (GEMS), the Asian element of a global air quality monitoring constellation of geostationary satellites. The GEMS launched into orbit in February 2020. 

About Ball Corporation

Ball Corporation supplies innovative, sustainable aluminum packaging solutions for beverage, personal care and household products customers, as well as aerospace and other technologies and services primarily for the U.S. government. Ball Corporation and its subsidiaries employ 21,500 people worldwide and reported 2020 net sales of $11.8 billion. Ball is an American company headquartered in Westminster, Colorado.

An effort funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has demonstrated the security of a computer processor that randomly shifts its structure to protect systems from hackers. 

A team from the University of Michigan developed Morpheus in 2019 then had the processor tested last year under a DARPA-sponsored study, Todd Austin and Lauren Biernacki from the university, said in a piece published Thursday on The Conversation.

Morpheus mixes up microarchitecture details to generate a puzzle that bars hackers from breaking in.

The technology underwent penetration testing against 525 security researchers, who never successfully hacked the processor during trials under DARPA's Finding Exploits to Thwart Tampering or FETT program.

DARPA announced the program's results earlier this year.

Gen. Richard Clarke, who leads U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), said the multi-domain future of warfare will influence special operations, DOD News reported Thursday.

He said at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in Florida that special operations will continue to be relevant as the military engages in near-peer competition against Russian and Chinese adversaries.

Clarke noted that future warfare will have a very multi-domain nature and will require new technologies that help forces track data across all these domains. The commander said USSOCOM must maintain its resources moving forward, as competitors continue to progress. 

"How do we harness mission command of our forces, … but also combined operations with ours, so that we're all seeing the same picture?" he asked.

Seven teams have won awards from a NASA-funded pool of $500,000 for energy infrastructure concepts that would support operations on the Moon.

Phase 1 of the $5 million Watts on the Moon Challenge asked teams to submit concepts for harvesting water and oxygen from the lunar south pole's dark craters, the space agency said Friday.

These concepts involve the use of a power plant stationed on the outer rim of the crater. The machine would generate the energy needed for the harvesting.

Astrobotic Technology proposed the use of small tethered rovers designed to connect a mobility platform with the power plant through cables. The company won a grand prize of $100,000 for this entry.

The challenge then tasked participants to have the power plant send energy to a water extraction plant placed within the crater. Michigan Technological University won this part of the challenge with the concept of a tethered rover system that unwinds superconducting wire into a crater.

The winning teams, announced Thursday, are companies and educational institutions. The winners and their corresponding award values are:

• Astrobotic Technology, $100,000
• Astrolight, $50,000
• KC Space Pirates, $50,000
• Michigan Technological University's Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab, $100,000
• Moonlight from the University of California, Santa Barbara, $50,000
• Skycorp, $100,000
• Team FuelPod, $50,000

Registration for the program's second phase will open in the fall of this year.

Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN) today announced that its Board of Directors voted to declare a regular quarterly cash dividend of 25 cents per share. The dividend is payable June 11, 2021, to shareholders of record at the close of business on June 1, 2021. The ex-dividend date will be May 28, 2021.

About Lumen Technologies

Lumen is guided by our belief that humanity is at its best when technology advances the way we live and work. With approximately 450,000 route fiber miles and serving customers in more than 60 countries, we deliver the fastest, most secure platform for applications and data to help businesses, government and communities deliver amazing experiences.

Software company VMware has partnered with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund research projects that will explore environmental sustainability methods and tools for digital information technology systems. 

Two teams will receive up to $6 million in total grants from the NSF-VMware Partnership on Next Generation of Sustainable Digital Infrastructure to explore carbon footprint reduction approaches in public, private and hybrid computing over a three-year period, the company said Thursday.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the California Institute of Technology will collaborate on the “A Sustainable and Reliable Carbon-Centric Cloud-Edge Software Infrastructure" project.

The University of Washington will work with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Michigan and Columbia University to conduct the “Foundations of Clean and Balanced Data Centers" research.

VMware added it will provide $500,000 to support a third study, themed “Carbon-Emissions Information Service for Sustainable Cloud Operation.” The company expects combined work from all three programs to introduce environmentally focused practices to operate public, private and hybrid cloud computing platforms.

Greg Lavender, chief technology officer of VMware, said the university teams will look to reduce carbon emissions from IT and data center assets.

"Through research catalyzed by this program, we hope to better understand how the carbon footprint of our digital infrastructure can be reduced," said Gurdip Singh, a division director in NSF's computer and information science and engineering directorate.

The partnership comes as the software company implements its decade-long commitment to helping increase environmental sustainability and resilience by 2030.

Federal agencies are initiating measures to address the potential risk posed by unmanned aircraft systems to national security and public safety amid an increasing number of drones flying near airports and other critical infrastructure, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The Federal Aviation Administration and NASA are working on an air traffic control system to help track small, low-flying consumer drones as part of efforts to promote legitimate flight activities.

In April, FAA loosened restrictions that prohibit flying at night and flight operations over moving vehicles and humans on the condition that pilots passed a test, installed approved lighting on their UAS and satisfying other criteria. The FAA will also require drone pilots to disclose their identity, altitude, location of their control stations and other data through remote identification.

“Remote identification will help law enforcement determine if a drone poses an actual threat that needs to be mitigated,” a spokeswoman for FAA said in a statement.

In April, the Department of Homeland Security performed tests in North Dakota to assess several industry technologies meant to detect UAS flights. DHS plans to use various sensors tailored to different topographical settings.

The Department of Defense is working to intercept and disable drones. In 2020, DOD tapped Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey to lead a new office for countering small UAS to prevent drone strikes and surveillance operations at U.S. military satellites and on the battlefield.

Gainey’s office collaborated with companies like Boeing to test drone interceptors in April at the U.S. Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The office is conducting experiments with high-powered microwave and directed-energy systems to counter drones and plans to carry out tests every six months.

Lisa Costa, chief information officer at U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), said SOCOM wants industry to come up with more flexible systems that could enable the command to easily adapt them to meet mission requirements, C4ISRNET reported Thursday.

“I want you to rethink your business models,” she told industry at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Special Operations Forces Industry Conference Thursday.

“Think about not necessarily always proposing a full-stack solution, but instead focusing on providing infrastructure as a service, data as a service, algorithms as a service, and keeping those separate so that we can mix and match them for the next unknown mission,” she added.

Costa said special operations forces need next-generation platforms that would provide operators secure data access across classification levels, network logins and resilient communications and capabilities that would allow them to process the collected data on the battlefield.

“What I really want is I want to enable the hardware that we currently have in place and let’s say it’s a phone to be the thing I need it to be at that moment in time,” Costa said during the event. “So it could be an unattended ground sensor. It could be a router or an AI computational processor.”