NASA has announced that the agency has selected 139 proposals for Phase II follow-on awards through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to provide approximately $104 million to 124 small businesses located across 31 states, NASA reported on Wednesday. 

"Small businesses offer innovative solutions that benefit every area of NASA and often find applications outside of the agency," said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate in Washington. "This announcement is another step forward in NASA's Moon to Mars exploration approach. The agency continues to invest in and support small businesses, as they continue to mature important technologies for future missions that can also benefit us on Earth."

NASA has annually invested in U.S. small businesses with innovative technologies, including companies developing better batteries, virtual assistants and lightweight materials, which will benefit space missions and improve life on Earth.

The agency’s Phase II awards will help advance NASA’s priorities, including the Artemis program, missions in aeronautics, human exploration and operations, science and space technology. The awarded companies are previous NASA SBIR Phase I recipients that have established the feasibility of their proposed technologies. 

With the Phase II awards, the companies will develop, demonstrate and deliver their technologies to NASA. Of the awardees, a woman-owned small business in Gaithersburg, Maryland, will develop a more reliable and highly efficient energy storage system. 

NASA will use the company’s technology for electric and hybrid-electric propulsion systems in airplanes. The technology could also be used in renewable energy systems, such as solar, wind and hybrid-electric vehicles.

A small business in Knoxville, Tennessee, was also awarded under the Phase II program. The company’s offerings will advance a lighter-weight shield material for fission power systems. NASA could integrate the technology to power sustainable operations on the Moon. The material could find other industrial applications on Earth.

The third small business, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will develop technology that could provide astronauts with a virtual assistant aboard spacecraft. The system would be able to interact with the crew and other spacecraft systems to perform tasks, diagnose problems and brainstorm solutions without help from ground teams. 

The Phase II proposals have been chosen according to the company’s technical merit and feasibility, Phase I results, as well as the experience, qualifications and facilities of the submitting organization. 

NASA's SBIR program has encouraged small businesses to develop innovative ideas that meet the specific research and development needs of the federal government. Of the program phases, Phase I has provided the opportunity to establish the scientific, technical and commercial merit and feasibility of the proposed innovation. SBIR Phase I contracts last for six months with a maximum funding of $125,000.

Phase II has been focused on the development, demonstration and delivery of the innovation, offering contracts that last for 24 months with a maximum funding of $750,000. Phase III will include the commercialization of innovative technologies, products and services resulting from either a Phase I or Phase II contract. 

"We are encouraged by the ingenuity and creativity we've seen from these companies in their Phase I work," said Jenn Gustetic, the NASA SBIR program executive. "The applications of their technologies, both inside and outside of NASA, are promising, and we look forward to seeing what this next round of accelerated seed funding will do."

About NASA

NASA's legacy of human space exploration, research and technology development has yielded countless innovations that prove the direct and profound impact of taxpayer investment in America's space program on our quality of life on Earth, including improved technologies for water purification, air filtration, kidney dialysis and tele-medicine, as well as research that has led to improved vaccines, drug therapies, and mitigations for bone loss. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of UltraWarm for Amazon Elasticsearch Service, a fully managed, warm storage tier that provides fast, interactive analytics of log data at one-tenth the cost of existing storage options, the company reported on Wednesday.

“UltraWarm is the most cost-effective Elasticsearch-compatible storage solution available. It is also performance-optimized, so customers can investigate and interactively visualize their data while they embrace data at scale,” said Raju Gulabani, VP of Databases and Analytics, AWS.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service will simplify the collection, analysis and visualization machine-generated log data from websites, mobile devices, and sensors. UltraWarm will provide Elasticsearch customers a warm storage tier that  will store large amounts of data cost-effectively and provide an interactive experience.

AWS has improve the volume of machine-generated log data as more applications are built using microservices, containers and purpose-built data stores. The company has also ensured real-time analysis of data, which has become essential to customers in order to resolve operational and security issues.

With the growth of log data, storing and analyzing large amounts of data is cost-prohibitive at scale, leading customers to use multiple analytics tools, or delete valuable data, missing important insights that the longer-term data could yield.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service will support two storage tiers, hot and UltraWarm to solve the issue. The hot tier will be used for indexing, updating, and providing the fastest access to data. UltraWarm will provide a distributed cache for more frequently accessed data.

UltraWarm will use advanced placement techniques to determine the blocks of data that are accessed less frequently, and can be moved outside of the cache to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). UltraWarm stores data in Amazon S3, providing up to 50 percent faster query execution versus competing warm-tier solutions.

UltraWarm will also lower cost by 80 percent compared to the warm-tier storage from other managed Elasticsearch offerings. With UltraWarm, customers can manage current and historical log data for interactive operational analysis and visualization in a single cluster.

AWS customers will be able to visualize search results across both recent and longer-term operational data, all from their Kibana interface. Additionally, UltraWarm will support all of the Elasticsearch Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), tools and features.

The tools will enable developers, DevOps engineers and InfoSec experts to use Amazon Elasticsearch Service for the analysis of recent and longer-term operational data without spending days to restore data from archives to an active searchable state in an Elasticsearch cluster.

Sophos has integrated AWS’ new offering. The company is a worldwide leader in next-generation cybersecurity, protecting organizations of all sizes in more than 150 countries from today’s most advanced cyber threats.

“Sophos uses Amazon Elasticsearch Service to run a large-scale security monitoring and alerting system, because it is highly performant and scalable,” said Prakash Talreja, Architect, Sophos. “We are excited that UltraWarm will enable us to retain log data for much longer in a cost-effective way. We see great value in leveraging UltraWarm to bring down cost and reduce operational overhead.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 76 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.

Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.

Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) on Tuesday fielded questions from members of the Senate Intelligence Committee during his confirmation hearing for the role of national intelligence director, CNN reported.

Senators questioned Ratcliffe over his views on the intelligence community’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential elections, treatment of whistleblowers under the Trump administration and origin of the new coronavirus in China.

Ratcliffe told lawmakers that his initial focus would be to seek answers to questions about the origins of the virus and help address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic if confirmed for the DNI role.

"If confirmed, the intelligence community will be laser-focused on getting all of the answers that we can regarding how this happened, when this happened, and I commit to providing with as much transparency to you as the law will allow and with due regard for sources and methods," he said.

In his opening statement, Ratcliffe vowed to provide Congress and the president with impartial intelligence if confirmed. "Let me be very clear. Regardless of what anyone wants our intelligence to reflect, the intelligence I will provide, if confirmed, will not be impacted or altered as a result of outside influence,” he said.