Gen, Jacqueline Van Ovost, commander of Air Mobility Command (AMC), said AMC plans to adopt a conditions-based approach to increase operational use of the KC-46 Pegasus tanker manufactured by Boeing as the aircraft program reaches for full operational capability, the Air Force reported Wednesday.

“AMC is working hard to ensure U.S. Transportation Command has the tanker capacity necessary to meet Joint Force requirements,” Van Ovost said Wednesday during a media roundtable at the Air Force Association’s virtual Aerospace Warfare Symposium. “To meet these requirements, we are exploring a variety of options or ‘tanker levers’ to relieve stress on today’s force, including a limited, operational use of the KC-46 on a conditions-based approach.” 

Through the approach, Van Ovost said the command intends to certify mission sets on an incremental basis to increase tanker capacity to support Joint Force operational taskings.

“What changes with this approach is we will now commit the KC-46 to execute missions similar to those they’ve been conducting over the past few years in the Operational Test and Evaluation plan, but can now include operational tasking from USTRANSCOM,” said Van Ovost. “Through this conditions-based approach, we expect to increase overall tanker capacity by bringing daily taskable KC-46 operational capabilities at scale and predicted reliability for joint force employment.” 

Boeing kicked off low-rate initial production of the tanker in 2016.

Jamie Holcombe, chief information officer of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), said machine learning helps USPTO speed up the process of assigning patent applications to examiners, FedScoop reported Wednesday.

The agency’s engineers who went to Google to learn more about TensorFlow application programming interfaces and machine learning are applying ML to patent search and classification processes using Python with TensorFlow.

“We immersed them in the culture, and they got Googly,” Holcombe said Wednesday during an ACT-IAC event. “They got certified in TensorFlow, which is the open-source library for a lot of neural network feedback loops.” 

USPTO is tapping vendors to help perform patent classifications and compare them against the agency’s algorithms. Holcombe said allowing patent examiners to work with vendors allows the agency to further improve the algorithms.

The Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) will award a combined amount of $446,200 to academic teams for research across multiple security areas. 

Participants of the Summer Research Team program will conduct studies at S&T-supported centers of excellence, which focus on agriculture security, terrorism, economic analysis and other homeland security topics.

The SRT Program aims to produce DHS-relevant research advancements by providing opportunities to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as early-career educators. SRT participants will perform this research over 10 weeks.

The department selected the teams from participants of the Minority Serving Institutions program, which is handled by S&T’s Office of University Programs. Specific topics tackled by the selected teams include storm surge predictions, cyber forensic intelligence, routing security and sulfur detection.

CoEs participating in the SRT program are:

• Arctic Domain Awareness Center
• Borders, Trade and Immigration Institute
• Center for Accelerated Operational Efficiency
• Coastal Resilience Center
• Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis
• Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute
• Maritime Security Center

The Department of Defense will award $2.4 million to Naval Postgraduate School for research on how the military can prepare for sudden climate events.

The “Advancing Resilience Theory and Tools to Combat Environmental Surprise" project will tackle issues faced by military installations during climate change, natural disasters and other environmental events, the U.S. Navy said Wednesday.

DOD's Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program will issue the funds over four years as NPS and partners from Arizona State University create tools that address these issues.

The effort will utilize Dystopia, an NPS-created virtual environment designed to simulate various events for training.

“This project is important because there is growing recognition within the DOD for the potential of climate-change related events to affect operations, readiness and missions,” said David Alderson, director of NPS’ Center for Infrastructure Defense.

NASA has decided to move forward with the final design of a rover that would fly to the moon in 2023 in search of water and ice. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will enter the implementation phase of its final design, following the rover's completion of a preliminary design review in August last year, NASA said Wednesday.

VIPER will travel to the Moon's south pole to map ice and other water sources in support of Artemis, NASA's effort to revive manned space exploration. The space agency wants to prepare for building human presence on the lunar surface.

“Scientific data gathered by VIPER will provide insight into the origin and distribution of water on the Moon, and help us prepare for human exploration by providing important information on the traversability, environment and resources at the lunar poles,” said Sarah Noble, program scientist for VIPER at NASA's headquarters.

NASA designed VIPER with the agility to move around craters and across a variety of surface types. The rover would avoid dark areas while traveling to escape moving shadows and navigate properly, as the Moon's periods of darkness can last several days.