The Department of Commerce (DOC) has provided funding to the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) to conduct a study to determine which agency should be in charge of civil space traffic management work. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross expects the NAPA study to be completed in the next two months, SpaceNews reported Friday.

“We’re hopeful that it will help Congress to clarify the direction going forward, and we’re quite optimistic that, as a result, we’ll get the budgetary relief we need in order to really fulfill the mission,” Ross said.

He said the department will immediately work on the mission once Congress allocates the funding to Commerce based on the NAPA study.

“We’re operating on the thesis that, ultimately, we will get the funding and we want to have the minimum delay from the time we get the funding until the time when we can be fully operational with the open architecture platform,” Ross added.

Ross also shared his insights on Analytical Graphics’ space traffic management efforts.

Military technology professionals said service branches seeking to field artificial intelligence-based systems on the battlefield should not only address issues related to software coding and database development but also the challenge of deploying “edge computing,” FedScoop reported Friday.

“It is great to see a lot of the commercial industries pushing their AI products to be able to work in edge-type environments,” Brig. Gen. Matt Easley, AI task force lead at the U.S. Army, said at a virtual summit.

The Army is advancing the development of augmented reality goggles and Easley said that integrating small computing systems into headsets that can show motion graphics could support warfighters on the battlefield.

The military should also consider mobile power sources and other IT requirements to advance edge computing.

"When we talk about edge systems, we invariably have to think about size, weight and power and communications," said Hans Cho, a staff scientist at the Naval Research Lab. "The commercially available systems are always invariably tethered. … That puts an incredible burden on the system."

The U.S. Marine Corps may follow the other service branches in using hypersonic weapons, in favor of a speed-focused operational concept, USNI News reported Thursday.

Mike White, assistant director for hypersonics at the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said in an online event that USMC’s battlefield agility makes the service a good candidate for hypersonics implementation.

USMC is talking to DARPA about a potential ground-based hypersonic weapon for use of U.S. marines, White said at the Defense One Tech Summit.

“The Army and the Navy and the Air Force are moving out aggressively with hypersonic systems, but we are also talking to the Marines about possible applications of ground-launched hypersonic capabilities,” he stated.

A program managed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) uses miniaturized chip components to generate optical frequencies in small, compressed forms. DARPA said Thursday it launched the Direct On-Chip Digital Optical Synthesizer or DODOS effort in 2014 to propagate the use of optical frequency synthesizers, a technology that generates frequency-precise lasers.

The program aims to reduce the size, power and cost requirements of optical frequency synthesizers so that scientists may use the technology outside of a laboratory setting. Scientists use optical frequency synthesizers for space exploration, light detection and ranging, quantum control and other pursuits.

DODOS employed microresonators that store light to produce small, compact packages of optical frequency combs. The resulting frequency takes a comb-shaped form, hence the name. The University of California at Santa Barbara demonstrated a link between two microchips via a microresonator and a laser.

“The UCSB team’s accomplishment could have broad-reaching implications for a number of commercial and defense photonics applications – from navigation systems to optical clocks to coherent communications,” said Gordon Keeler, DARPA's program manager for DODOS.

The Department of Energy has earmarked over $65M in funds to support 93 nuclear technology projects from 28 various states.

DOE said Thursday it will provide more than $38.6M to back university-led nuclear research and development projects in 24 states through the Nuclear Energy University Program.

The department has allotted $5.7M to finance 21 research reactor and infrastructure modernization efforts, while $10.8M will be awarded to three projects that will work to address technical gaps that affect the Office of Nuclear Energy's mission objectives.

DOE will award over $2.4M to three national laboratories, one industry partner and three university-led projects that will explore material and nuclear fuel applications, while two of the projects will receive $1M in research funds.

Five national laboratory-led R&D projects will also secure $5M to explore and address crosscutting nuclear energy gaps in efforts to build instruments, sensors and production approaches for nuclear reactor plant and fuel applications.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that the U.S. Air Force needs to improve its monitoring and reporting of financial data related to its mission-critical programs.

In a report released Thursday, GAO said the Air Force failed to fully execute its enterprise risk management (ERM) approach as mandated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in handling its fiscal 2019 mission-critical assets valued at $398 billion.

The service branch also failed to establish comprehensive procedures for analyzing internal controls, which must evaluate all key areas crucial to meeting mission objectives, GAO said.

In addition, the agency noted that the Air Force was unable to implement results of the reviews for mission-critical assets in its analyses of internal controls.

“As a result, the Air Force is not fully managing its challenges and opportunities from an enterprise-wide view,” GAO said. “Until it fully incorporates ERM—planned for some time after 2023—the Air Force will continue to leverage its current governance and reporting structures as well as its existing internal control reviews.”