A National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) official said the agency is looking to award multiple contracts to access commercial imagery from synthetic aperture radar satellites to study how space data products could support the intelligence community mission, SpaceNews reported Monday.

Pete Muend, director of NRO’s commercial systems program office, told the publication the agency began the sourcing process after its market survey in November drew many responses from the private sector.

NRO awarded a series of study contracts during 2019 to Maxar Technologies, BlackSky Global, Planet, HySpecIQ, Capella Space and HawkEye 360.

The awards sought to determine the sector's capacity to help the agency expand its enterprise geospatial intelligence architecture with commercial imagery offerings and inform future procurement efforts.

Muend noted that his office is working with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to define a set of requirements and develop a new licensing model for commercial imagery acquisition.

Maxar will continue to provide NRO data from the company's fleet of Earth observation satellites through August 2023 under the EnhancedView Follow-On agreement awarded in 2018 and valued at $300 million each year.

The U.S. Army has approved a document to facilitate the rapid prototyping and fielding of the Tactical Space Layer, the Signal Magazine reported Monday.

The TSL abbreviated capability development document approved by the service’s assured positioning, navigation and timing/space cross-functional team will help advance the rapid experimentation and prototyping of tactical space-based sensors with ground-based systems and other platforms to speed up the sensor-to-shooter timeline needed for multidomain operations.

“The TSL will provide deep area sensing, rapid targeting and unmatched battlefield situational awareness,” said Lt. Col. Travis Tallman, director of the cross-functional team’s Tactical Space Signature Effort. “Leveraging the TSL will further enable long-range precision fires and ground maneuvers in GPS-challenged environments.”

The Army plans to integrate TSL with its ground station called the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node or TITAN.

The APNT/Space cross-functional team will conduct live fire exercises in U.S. Army Pacific and U.S. Army Europe and Africa to evaluate the TSL prototypes later this year. It will also test TSL prototypes during Project Convergence at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona and White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Seventeen Impact Level 5 tenant owners have made security configuration changes to a Microsoft 365 cloud environment being developed for use by the Department of Defense, according to Danielle Metz, deputy chief information officer for the Information Enterprise at the Pentagon.

Metz said in an interview with Nextgov that the Microsoft team, IL5 tenant owners and engineers from the Defense Information Systems Agency, military services and department components collaborated to implement standard configuration guides in the DOD 365 environment.

The implementation moved the Pentagon closer to providing the environment with direct internet access for web browsers. According to Metz, they aim to have the whole DOD 365 environment offering the capability by early June. 

She added that the team will then move to bring-your-own-approved devices and desktops. The Pentagon applies zero-trust approach to ensure that the DOD 365 environment tenants comply with cybersecurity requirements. IL5 covers controlled unclassified information.

The Defense Enterprise Office Solutions contract provides for the work on the environment. General Dynamics' information technology (GDIT) business is the integrator for the initiative. 

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter performed its initial flight on the Red Planet and flew for a total of 39.1 seconds at an altitude of 10 feet on Monday. 

A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) confirmed the first flight demonstration of the solar-powered helicopter after receiving data from Ingenuity through the space agency’s Perseverance Mars rover, the agency said Monday.

The rover documented the helicopter’s autonomous flight operations using its Navcam and Mastcam-Z imagers. The Ingenuity team developed the algorithms running on navigation, control and guidance systems aboard the helicopter.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said the Martian field that served as the venue for the flight demo will be called the Wright Brothers Field in honor of aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright from Dayton, Ohio.

The helicopter team will analyze all imagery and data from the flight demo and come up with a plan for the second flight test that is set to take place no earlier than April 22nd. The team will assess how to expand the aircraft’s flight profile once Ingenuity carries out and survives the second experimental test.

Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology and a 2021 Wash100 Award winner, said that due to an increase in patching efforts, the Biden administration is “standing down” the two unified coordination groups that were established in response to cyber breaches involving SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange.

The White House “will be handling further responses through standard incident management procedures,” Neuberger said in a statement on Monday.

She said the private sector played a role in the development of a Microsoft one-click tool to help facilitate data sharing and expedite patching efforts for victims. “This type of partnership sets precedent for future engagements on significant cyber incidents,” she added.

Neuberger mentioned other efforts in response to the cyber incidents, including the release of cyber advisories by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the creation of a methodology by CISA to monitor trends in patching and efforts of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI to identify the scale of the cyber incidents in partnership with industry and legal authorities.

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The State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) uses artificial intelligence in efforts to address the fake news spreads and state-sponsored propaganda targeting the U.S. government, Nextgov reported Friday.

Daniel Kimmage, acting coordinator of GEC, said at a Foreign Policy event that the center uses AI to identify coordinated threats and understand the corresponding landscape.

He said they apply AI and statistics to process input gathered from the intelligence community and traditional information sources. GEC's AI tools include natural language processing and mathematical models that help analysts determine the contextual meaning of the selected text.

The center has tasked a team to identify modern technologies that have the potential to support the GEC mission, with more than 200 tools reviewed so far.