An office within the Air Force Civil Engineer Center’s planning and integration directorate has completed an initial training class for operators and instructors of small unmanned aircraft systems as the military service prepares to incorporate drones into mission essential tasks.

The sUAS office for the AF Geobase Program trained geospatial integration personnel through classroom and hands-on activities meant to help them learn how to operate Group 1 sUAS platforms that weigh less than 20 pounds and to collect data using the systems, the U.S. Air Force said Sunday.

Julio Toala, GeoBase operations manager and sUAS program manager at the Air Force, estimates that the branch's data gathering, image processing and light detection and ranging system capabilities would increase 10-fold with the use of drones.

He expects the team to reach another program milestone in the fall.

Jose Alfonsin, a Woolpert sUAS developer who supports the GeoBase mission, said an sUAS has the potential to help military construction project managers monitor progress without them going to the site and assist civil engineers when they need to inspect building areas such as a rooftop.

The AF GeoBase team is planning to forward policies and strategies for the full execution of sUAS systems that will aid the operations of AFCEC directorates, including the development of a playbook that will be used for training.

With the rising cyber threats to both the public and private sectors, five industry associations are pushing the House and Senate Appropriations committees to authorize a $705 million increase in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency budget for fiscal year 2022.

The Alliance for Digital Innovation, Computing Technology Industry Association, Cybersecurity Coalition, Information Technology Industry Council and the Internet Association told lawmakers in a joint letter Tuesday the funding boost would help CISA meet cybersecurity goals in the long term.

Citing the recent attacks on SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline and Pulse Connect Secure, the associations said the additional budget is necessary to protect the country’s information technology assets from a large-scale breach.

The groups wrote that the shift to cloud-based and virtual environments of the workforce due to the COVID-19 pandemic made the service systems more vulnerable to attackers.

“Given this combination of larger attack surfaces and increased use of sophisticated cyberattacks by our adversaries, we must act quickly to strengthen our nation’s security posture,” according to the letter obtained by Federal News Network.

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act approved by Congress in March includes $650 million for cyber risk mitigation initiatives at CISA.

While the funding allocation is a one-time capital to address urgent cybersecurity matters, the associations said it only amounts to “a tiny fraction of the long-term investment needed to build and empower CISA.”

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.