The Military Health System is working to develop medical products and discover new prevention techniques, tracing methods and other approaches in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Federal News Network reported Monday.

Air Force Col. Todd Rasmussen, associate dean for research at the Uniformed Services University, said the MHS has found new uses for a registry designed to help with combat wounds, known as the Joint Trauma System.

“Almost immediately in 2020, when the MHS needed a go-to organization to begin to gather data on, of all things, not combat injuries, but of COVID positive patients,” Rasmussen said. “We went to the JPS because they had a registry that allowed us to, to look at and gather real world data sort of near real time data on these cases. They have a global network of performance improvement and care Improvement where we discuss care and how to best diagnose and treat patients with COVID.”

Another innovation the military put to use during the pandemic is the Food and Drug Administration-approved COVID-19 Airway Management Isolation Chamber or CAMIC, a personal protective equipment designed to reduce airborne particles using a negative pressure vacuum.

“In mid-March, after some brainstorming, we came up with a simple device, the CAMIC, which was a low cost, $15, and easy to build with materials very ubiquitous to every healthcare system and community,” said Dr. Steven Hong, assistant professor of surgery at the Uniformed Services University.

Several lawmakers have called on House leaders to allocate an additional $1 billion for the Technology Modernization Fund as the lower chamber prepares to work on the next COVID-19 relief package with the Senate.

“Throughout this global health crisis, millions of Americans facing illness, unemployment, food insecurity, and an inability to pay their mortgages or rent have looked to the federal government for help.

Yet despite urgent Congressional action to provide unprecedented levels of economic assistance, those in need have had their misery exacerbated by a broken IT infrastructure that has prevented them from receiving timely support,” a group of House lawmakers wrote in the July 24 letter.

They urged the House leadership to include in the upcoming relief measure the funding for TMF to help federal agencies modernize their IT systems to better respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and address the economic needs of American families.

The letter was signed by 11 lawmakers led by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, and Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House Oversight’s government operations subcommittee.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has developed software designed to help assess the capacity of autonomous platforms and robotic technologies to maneuver subterranean environments.

ARL said Tuesday the SubT-Tunnel dataset uses simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) elements to inform the development of unmanned systems that will be used to navigate natural and man-made underground environments.

The software suite virtually places the autonomous system into a simulated environment such as a Pittsburgh research mine to test various approaches to locating assets and survivors.

ARL noted that it used SubT-Tunnel to test the OmniMapper software and Google’s Cartographer offering as well as other approaches beyond GPS and LiDAR capabilities.

According to the lab, SubT-Tunnel was based on objectives for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Subterranean Challenge Tunnel Circuit.

ARL published details on the effort in a research paper as part of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has enetered into an agreement with the University of California (UC) San Diego to further research and development efforts on unmanned systems to support maritime applications.

UC San Diego said Wednesday its Scripps Institution of Oceanography will work with the NOAA Office of Marine and Aviation Operations (OMAO) to conduct a 10-year effort to improve the capacity of unmanned systems to collect ocean observation data.

Ongoing efforts under the partnership include the development and testing of an unmanned surface vessel to obtain oceanographic and meteorological data to support entities like the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations initiative.

The team is also working to establish a framework for meeting the staffing, training and operational needs of a new unmanned maritime systems unit within OMAO.

U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Timothy Gallaudet, the deputy administrator of NOAA, said the agency intends to combine its fleet and aircraft resources with Scripps’ R&D expertise to drive “innovative use of unmanned systems” such as data collection in remote or extreme environments.

According to UC San Diego, the agreement comes as part of NOAA’s efforts to achieve goals under the 2018 Commercial Engagement Through Ocean Technology Act.

NOAA and Scripps are also collaborating with the University of Southern Mississippi to support a new unmanned systems facility in Gulfport, Miss.

The 625th Strategic Operations Squadron (STOS) has installed a new virtual trainer system designed to help airmen at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska carry out in-house training activities.

The Virtual Airborne Processing Trainer aims to expose trainees on the weapons system that will launch intercontinental ballistic missiles from an airborne E-6 Mercury aircraft, the U.S. Air Force said Sunday.

USAF noted the training platform is purely virtual and resembles air launch control system personnel's battle staff compartment area. The 625th STOS is slated to resume initial qualification training following the completion of the platform's installation and acceptance tests.

Offutt AFB's traditional trainer unit was damaged by a flood in 2019, prompting 625th STOS to seek alternative training methods.

The U.S. Army has commenced this year’s Network Modernization Experiment (NetModX) in New Jersey to support the service branch’s command, control, communication, computers, cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C5ISR) tool development efforts, C4ISRnet reported Sunday.

Field testing activities under the third annual NetModX began last week at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst and are slated to conclude by Oct. 2. As part of the event, Army personnel will utilize simulated environments to assess C5ISR technologies that were previously evaluated through laboratory-based experiments.

The theme for this year’s exercise, mission command and command-post survivability, will cover network resiliency technologies intended to withstand electronic threats in various environments. The Army plans to test the technologies ahead of preliminary design review activities in April 2021.

“What resiliency means to us is the network bends, it doesn’t break,” said Michael Brownfield, chief of the C5ISR Center’s future capabilities office within the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command. “And the commanders have the information they need and the coordination that they need to fight the battle.”

Technologies being developed for NetModX 2020 include a distributed system for mission command and a modular “system of systems” involving radio-frequency functionalities.

NASA has concluded the preliminary design review of a ground system that would support a new space telescope designed to capture high-detail images depicting space.

The space agency said Saturday that its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is designed to help scientists pursue studies that may unlock new findings on the cosmos, including what goes beyond the solar system. The ground system will link Earth's scientists to data gathered by the new space telescope.

“We are on track to complete the data system in time for launch, and we look forward to the ground-breaking science it will enable," said Ken Carpenter, the ground system's project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The new telescope is expected to generate panoramic images with the same resolution quality produced by Hubble Space Telescope but with a greater field of view. Roman is also designed to collect data at speeds roughly 500 times beyond Hubble's.

Roman will explore locations further than the moon after a five-year primary mission. The telescope will also support the microlensing survey to discover planetary activities taking place outside the solar system.

NASA plans to launch Roman within the coming decade.