Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, deputy commandant for combat development and integration at the U.S. Marine Corps, said the naval integration between the Navy and the Marines is shaping how program managers decide on procurements, including the acquisition of an unmanned aerial system called the Marine Air-Ground Task Force UAS Expeditionary, USNI News reported Monday.

“We have to do this together. …  We’re talking about, while the Navy is working the Future Vertical Lift and that is kind of foremost in their priority group right now, is we start moving toward MUX – what it is, what it’s not, what it has to do – and mostly it’s [electronic warfare],” Smith said. “One of the requirements is, it has to fit on a hangar on a destroyer, so before we make big decisions, we have to confer with the Navy to make sure we don’t go down a dead end where the Navy says, look, two years ago you took this right turn, I can’t go with you anymore, if only you had asked.”

MUX is a large Group 5 UAS meant to help the Marine Corps close a gap in its sea-based aviation capability. The drone would have tiltrotors and helicopters for lift and as well as the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter jet for data collection and strike missions.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has partnered with the building equipment industry to study alternative refrigerants and methods to increase energy efficiency of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems.

ORNL said Thursday it will work with Taylor Commercial Foodservice, Emerson Climate Technologies, Enginuity Power Systems, Baltimore Aircoil Company and the National Automatic Merchandising Association through separate collaborative research-and-development agreements.

The projects will include the development of climate-friendly refrigerants for food processing, assessment of potential hazards and the advancement of a heat exchanger technology.

“These collaborations are just the beginning of what we anticipate being a record number of industry partnerships over the next year to develop breakthroughs for energy-efficient buildings and a more secure, resilient power grid,” said Moe Khaleel, associate laboratory director for energy and environmental sciences at ORNL.

A Battelle and University of Tennessee joint venture operates the lab for DOE.

The department’s building technologies office aims to cut average energy consumption rates in all buildings nationwide by 30 percent in 2030, ORNL noted.

The U.S. Census Bureau awarded prize money worth $20K to each of the five selected teams that presented data projects meant to optimize the population count in 2020, Federal News Network reported Monday.

One of the selected projects as part of the Census Opportunity Project came from a team from business management consultancy firm MotivF, which showed efforts to improve trust in the 2020 census among hard-to-count communities.

Census Accelerate is another program that gathered community partners, influencers, copywriters and designers to come up with posters, memes and other materials to spread information about the 2020 count.

“The community partners really need content. A lot of them tell us that while they’re doing a lot of really important boots-on-the-ground efforts, they don’t have much capacity to get creative or to develop digital content,” said Mara Abrams, director of the Census Open Innovation Labs.

Maj. Gen. Thomas Murphy, director of Protecting Critical Technology Task Force at the Department of Defense, told Breaking Defense in an interview published Monday about the task force’s efforts to come up with policies to implement security controls meant to protect technologies.

“It’s not my decision to say, ‘you can’t do business,’” Murphy said. “We’re trying to make policy changes. We’re trying to elevate the importance of security in the requirements and acquisitions processes. That’s what this is about.”

“Depending on the criticality of that output, whatever it is you’re buying, I don’t want to go so fast that we sacrifice security,” he said.

Murphy also talked about plans to implement new rules, such as vetting researchers getting DoD funding for “problematic foreign connections” and evaluating companies bidding for Pentagon contracts for security.

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s innovation unit has tested an unmanned aerial system designed for long distances and fitted with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technologies.

The Air Force said Sunday the AFRL’s Center for Rapid Innovation began conducting initial flight tests for the Ultra Long Endurance Aircraft Platform at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah earlier this year. A continuous demonstration took place last week ahead of subsequent tests to assess the platform’s flight endurance.

Ultra LEAP features anti-jam GPS technology, a satellite-based command-and-control platform, an ISR data relay link and other elements designed to support autonomous takeoff and landing.

“Ultra LEAP mission is a significant milestone in solving the tyranny of distance problem for ISR systems,” said Alok Das, senior scientist at AFRL and director of CRI. He noted that the team conducted the two-and-a-half-day test after 10 months of development activities. 

AFRL expects the UAS to be ready for operational fielding by 2020. The lab also plans to conduct CRI efforts focused on UAS technologies designed for short takeoff and landing distances and nontraditional deployment locations.

A NASA-led team has identified a sample collection site on Asteroid Bennu for a certain investigative mission, following a year of assessments.

The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer or OSIRIS-Rex team selected the “Nightingale” site due to the abundance of fine-grained material and low amount of hazards, NASA said Friday.

Nightingale was among four candidate sites that the team selected based on safety. The other sites were Osprey, Kingfisher and Sandpiper.

“After thoroughly evaluating all four candidate sites, we made our final decision based on which site has the greatest amount of fine-grained material and how easily the spacecraft can access that material while keeping the spacecraft safe,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The university leads the mission’s scientific activities, while NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center performs systems engineering, mission assurance and administrative efforts. Lockheed Martin provided the mission’s spacecraft and KinetX Aerospace supports navigation.

Mark Andress, chief information officer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and Nand Mulchandani, chief technology officer of the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said NGA would benefit from the use of AI.

Andress said AI could help the agency collect and analyze data for safety and navigation efforts that require processing through networks of varying classifications, DoD said Friday.

He added that the technology would help analysts interpret data and leaders make decisions through the creation of smart algorithms.

The CIO also AI-related highlighted challenges faced by DoD: large data volumes, separated defense mapping networks and an agency-wide cultural shift upon AI implementation.

“An algorithm used for AI decision making that is 74 percent efficient is not one that will be put into production to certify geolocation because that’s not good enough,” Andress said.

He concluded that AI would support NGA in the future, but implementation will require time.