Northrop Grumman Corporation and NASA have successfully completed the final sunshield deployment test on the James Webb Space Telescope, the company reported on Friday. The successful test will prepare the telescope for launch in 2021.

“The success of this important milestone demonstrates the rigor and dedication of the Northrop Grumman and NASA team,” said Scott Willoughby, vice president and program manager, James Webb Space Telescope, Northrop Grumman. “The sunshield is designed to deploy in space and that is exactly what we validated during this final round of testing.”

The James Webb Space Telescope’s sunshield will offer protection from light and heat emitted from the sun, Earth, and moon, as well as the observatory. The sunshield maintains Webb’s scientific instruments in a deep cold, approximately negative 388 degrees Fahrenheit.

To fully deploy Webb’s sunshield, the Northrop-NASA team will activate the telescope’s components and complete a series of commands to begin the release of devices, which will release the sunshield’s five layers. 

Following the release of several more cable restraint devices, a coordinated series of individual motor movements are completed, which will then deploy and tension each sunshield layer. Then, the sunshield will open into a diamond-shaped form through a system of pulleys and springs.

Northrop Grumman will work to complete the next series of development, including completing the final wing deployments of the primary mirror to verify flight worthiness, followed by a final and complete full systems evaluation before shipping to the launch site.

Northrop Grumman leads the industry team for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. NASA leads an international partnership that includes the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Goddard Space Flight Center manages the Webb Telescope project. The Space Telescope Science Institute is responsible for science and mission operations and ground station development.

About Northrop Grumman

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The U.S. Navy is working to improve the readiness of its aircraft fleet using artificial intelligence, data analytics and the concept of reliability control boards, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

The service is using AI algorithms to process aircraft maintenance data and generate insights from the collected data. The Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), for instance, is using the Army-developed Composite Learning Algorithm for Records Evaluation system to facilitate data processing.

“So the artificial intelligence solution looks at relationships in the data and what’s documented to say, ‘Hey, when you said [the problem is] this, it’s actually this. And that helps us score and correct all that maintenance data so we don’t have some of the inaccuracies that get perpetuated through the system,” said Jason Thomas, principal analyst at NAWCAD’s data analytics team.

Robert Smith, head of the reliability control board data analytics team at NAWCAD, told the network in an interview about the Failure Reporting and Corrective Action System and how it could help advance predictive maintenance using data.

“It will contain all the data behind a degrader, including what we’ve identified with CLARE,” Smith said of the system. “It will actually provide us with the ability to optimize our maintenance to predict failures before they occur. It will give us the confidence that the time on wing for a particular component is X. And before we get to X, and that aircraft is inducted for some type of maintenance, we will have the confidence to remove that component and replace it before it fails.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an emergency directive directing all agencies to disconnect SolarWinds’ Orion Network Management products from their networks to mitigate a cyber vulnerability and to date, there has been no sign of breach in the Department of Defense’s classified and non-classified networks, C4ISRNET reported Thursday.

“We continue to assess our DoD Information Networks for indicators of compromise and take targeted actions to protect our systems beyond the defensive measures we employ each day. To date, we have no evidence of compromise of the DODIN,” said Vice Adm. Nancy Norton, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), commander of Joint Force Headquarters-DoDIN and a former Wash100 Award winner. 

“We will continue to work with the whole-of-government effort to mitigate cyber threats to the nation,” added VADM Norton. 

Former military information technology and cyber professionals told the publication it would take some time before officials can assess the full extent of the cyber breach’s impact.

“I couldn’t estimate on that, honestly, because … all the DoD networks are very complicated,” said Danelle Barrett, a retired Navy rear admiral and former deputy chief information officer of the Navy. “You’ve got a combination of legacy networks and more modern networks. Some things are more automated than others on those networks. So it’s going to take a lot of digging … There’s probably things that they can identify right away. It’ll be awhile before they have the whole complete picture.” 

A U.S. Air Force pilot flew with an artificial intelligence aboard the Lockheed Martin-built U-2 Dragon Lady aircraft during a test flight held Tuesday, the service reported Wednesday.

The AI algorithm, called ARTUu, was in charge of tactical navigation and sensor employment during a simulated missile strike as part of a reconnaissance mission. The algorithm used the aircraft’s radar in detecting enemy launchers, while the pilot was responsible for finding hostile aircraft.

The pilot transitioned the sensor control to the AI algorithm after liftoff. During the flight, the algorithm operated the sensor using learned insights from more than 500,000 computer simulated training iterations. 

“ARTUu’s groundbreaking flight culminates our three-year journey to becoming a digital force,” said Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics and a three-time Wash100 Award recipient, “Putting AI safely in command of a U.S. military system for the first time ushers in a new age of human-machine teaming and algorithmic competition. Failing to realize AI’s full potential will mean ceding decision advantage to our adversaries.” 

Researchers at Air Combat Command’s U-2 Federal Laboratory developed and trained the AI algorithm to carry out in-flight tasks.