NASA has certified the computer system that would process the data of an upcoming uncrewed lunar flyby, which will serve as a prerequisite to future astronaut missions.

The spacecraft command and control system (SCCS) is designed to address the information capacity and speed requirements of NASA's Artemis I mission, the space agency said Thursday.

SCCS would handle data generated by the Orion spacecraft, the Space Launch System and ground support equipment. NASA expects these systems to generate 100 megabytes per second altogether.

“The SCCS system engineering and performance teams evaluate the data after each simulation to ensure the system is performing per specifications and no unexpected errors were triggered,” said Mike Van Houten, the Launch Control System project manager at the command, control and communications organization within NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems team.

Artemis I, scheduled to launch late this year, will provide data that SCCS developers may use to improve the system for future Artemis missions. NASA aims to revive manned space exploration through the Artemis program.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a program that focuses on expanding the computational power capacity of high-performance computing systems in line with energy efficiency standards. 

DARPA said Thursday that the Low-Temperature Logic Technology (LTLT) program is focused on developing a device/circuit capability that can achieve a performance and power improvement of 25 times compared to room-temperature central processing units.

Specifically, DARPA seeks to develop low-temperature fin field-effect transistors (FinFETs) based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors (CMOS) to support Very Large Scaled Integration (VLSI) functionalities.

The agency also intends to produce and test a static random-access memory (SRAM) cell with a compact framework and the capacity to handle foundational circuit elements for HPC engines. 

LTLT will additionally leverage DARPA’s Toolbox Initiative which provides licensing support for proprietary commercial technologies.

“While microelectronics is typically designed to operate at room temperature, we know that device characteristics improve significantly at reduced temperatures,” said Jason Woo, a program manager for the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA.

Interested participants must submit proposals by May 18.

President Biden is expected to submit to Congress the administration's discretionary spending top line requests for the fiscal year 2022 on Friday, signaling the start of the annual budget and appropriations process, DefenseNews reported Friday.

The upcoming $715 billion defense budget request is slightly less than 2021’s request when adjusted for inflation. A detailed budget request with agency-by-agency estimates is expected to be released in late spring.

However, the budget process will reportedly progress more slowly due to a backlog of Congressional legislation in recent months.

“What’s going to be different this year is we’re facing a monumental legislative traffic jam. Those are going to be the priorities of the administration, and your traditional authorization and appropriation bills really can’t get cranked up until we get the budget details ― and we’ll be lucky to see serious budget details before Memorial Day,” commented Arnold Punaro, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director and the chairman of the board of the National Defense Industrial Association.

Pandemic relief spending, infrastructure packages and voting rights legislation are some of the bills' Democrats, who control both houses of Congress, want to pass during Biden’s first year. They also seek to boost U.S. competitiveness with China.

The late spring schedule for the detailed budget request is expected to pose challenges to the appropriations and authorizing committees, which will increase the likelihood of Congress missing the deadline to pass federal spending before Oct. 1, the end of the fiscal year.

President Biden plans to issue an executive order that will focus on addressing recent cybersecurity issues that could impact the software supply chain, Defense One reported Thursday.

Jeff Greene, acting senior director for cybersecurity at the National Security Council (NSC), told attendees at a Cybersecurity Coalition event that binding requirements under the executive order will be established after at least six months.

He added that the criteria will likely fall under the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) purview. The White House is also rolling out a program to address potential issues associated with the order’s scope, said Greene.

“We're going to need all developers who are selling software to the government to implement more rigorous and predictable mechanisms to ensure that their products and their software behave, both as intended and as designed,” said Greene.

If you're interested in the federal government's cybersecurity initiatives then check out GovCon Wire's Defense Cybersecurity Forum coming up on May 12. Click here to learn more

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon Lookout for Equipment, a new service that uses AWS-developed machine learning models to help customers perform predictive maintenance on the equipment in their facilities.

Amazon Lookout for Equipment ingests sensor data from a customer’s industrial equipment (e.g. pressure, flow rate, RPMs, temperature, and power), and then it trains a unique machine learning model to accurately predict early warning signs of machine failure or suboptimal performance using real-time data streams from the customer’s equipment.

With Amazon Lookout for Equipment, customers can detect equipment abnormalities with speed and precision, quickly diagnose issues, reduce false alerts, and avoid expensive downtime by taking action before machine failures occur.

There are no up-front commitments or minimum fees with Amazon Lookout for Equipment, and customers pay for the amount of data ingested, the compute hours used to train a custom model, and the number of inference-hours used. 

The U.S. Air Force has introduced a new mission statement to highlight the capabilities and competitive advantage that airpower brings to the country and joint operations as they counter near-peer adversaries.

“To fly, fight, and win…airpower anytime, anywhere” is the Air Force’s new mission statement, the service said Thursday.

Gen. Charles Brown, chief of staff of the Air Force, said the service consulted enlisted airmen, officers, guardsmen, civilians and reservists to come up with the mission statement. He also highlighted the role of the total force in advancing airpower.

“Delivering airpower for our nation requires more than just aircraft,” Brown added. “It requires Total Force Airmen – active duty, Guard, Reserve, civilians – in all Air Force specialties working together as a seamless team to operate, maintain and enable our mission and bring the unique capabilities and effects of air power to bear.”

The service has five core missions for airpower and those are air superiority; command and control; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; rapid global mobility; and global strike.

The Department of Commerce (DOC) has named to the entity list seven Chinese institutions for activities that threaten the country’s national security and foreign policy interests. The entities are supercomputer developers that support China’s military modernization and other destabilizing efforts, the department said Thursday.

“Supercomputing capabilities are vital for the development of many – perhaps almost all – modern weapons and national security systems, such as nuclear weapons and hypersonic weapons,” said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“The Department of Commerce will use the full extent of its authorities to prevent China from leveraging U.S. technologies to support these destabilizing military modernization efforts,” Raimondo added.

The entities added to the list are Shanghai High-Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center, Sunway Microelectronics, Tianjin Phytium Information Technology and national supercomputing centers in Jinan, Shenzhen, Wuxi and Zhengzhou.

The department’s bureau of industry and security uses the entity list as a tool to control the in-country transfer, export and re-export of products subject to the Export Administration Regulations to organizations, companies, or individuals that pose a risk to U.S. national security.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) posted the National Intelligence Council's (NIC) Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World, a quadrennial report that details factors that could affect the national security environment over the next two decades.

Demographics, the environment, economics and technology are the four structural forces highlighted in the Global Trends 2040 report, ODNI said Thursday.

According to the release, a major demographic shift is considered as one of the trends that will have an impact on national security because governments face issues of anticipated slow down in global population and economic growth while seeking to enhance productivity through education and infrastructure.

Global Trends 2040 also warned about an increase in the physical effects of climate change that could result in more risks to economic prosperity, energy security, food, health and water.

Rising national debt, a more complex and fragmented trading environment and several other global economic trends are also likely to lessen the flexibility of governments, according to the report.

Technology, on the other hand, is seen as having the potential to help address climate change. The report also claimed that technological developments over the next 20 years will likely increase ever faster and that effort to achieve technological dominance will have economic, military and societal security implications.

The research and development arm of the Department of the Navy has launched an Amazon Web Services-supported cloud environment where Impact Level 6-classified information can be stored and processed.

AWS said Thursday users of the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific’s Secret Wide Area Network and external customers of the Navy and Department of Defense can now access the AWS Secret Region IL-6 environment, enabling classified secret level workloads to be tackled through the commercial cloud.

Delores Washburn, chief engineer of NIWC PAC, said the move is aimed at expanding cloud service coverage from IL-4 and IL-5 to IL-6 projects.

Cloud services with provisional authorization from the Defense Information Systems Agency for secret workloads are provided through the AWS Secret Region.

The environment is in line with a Navy policy aimed at optimizing use of commercial cloud hosting services for operation, sustainment, design and transfer of information technology capabilities.

AWS received a blanket purchase agreement in June 2019 for  DOD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide IL-6 cloud services.