NASA has chosen four organizations to deliver science, technology, engineering and mathematics projects that promote space exploration.

Bell Museum of Natural History and Planetarium, Carnegie Institute, EcoExploratorio and Science Museum of Minnesota will host these educational projects under the Teams Engaging Affiliated Museums and Informal Institutions, or Team II, program, NASA said Wednesday.

The organizations will receive funds from a pool of $3.5M in cooperative agreements to pursue projects that tackle Moon and Mars exploration.

Bell Museum of Natural History in Minneapolis will host a planetarium show that will accommodate members of hearing-impaired and physically disabled communities. The presentation will also showcase the careers of such personnel at the space agency.

Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh will engage museums and schools with programs that simulate problem-solving situations in lunar exploration.

Puerto Rico-based EcoExploratorio will administer STEM events at community centers and schools within the island.

Lastly, Science Museum of Minnesota will hold an exhibit where participants can build imaginary shelters for Mars missions.

The projects are scheduled to be carried out over the next three years.

“These cooperative agreements will enable the recipients’ efforts to focus on the most up-to-date information from NASA,” said Beverly Girten, director of institutional engagement at the space agency’s Office of STEM Engagement.

NASA aims to further explore the Moon and Mars via manned missions under the Artemis program.

Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division has recently broken ground on the Virginia-based site of a future cyber warfare innovation facility.

The service branch said Monday its 10K-square-foot Cyber Warfare Engineering Laboratory will serve as a testing ground for weapon system software and hardware, cyber platforms and industrial infrastructure control systems.

“It’s only fitting that NSWC Dahlgren be given the conn for cyber engineering and be selected as the site for the Cyber Warfare Engineering Lab,” said Scott St. Pierre, Naval Sea Systems Command’s enterprise information technology officer.

Capt. Casey Plew, NSWCDD commanding officer, and Darren Barnes, NSWCDD acting technical director, also gave speeches at the groundbreaking ceremony.

“It will host live, virtual and constructive cyber warfare events to enable and empower our cyber experts to develop, build, test, accredit, field and sustain cyber-resilient systems,” Barnes said about the laboratory.

A team of government and industry engineers addressed exhaust gas reingestion and other engine integration issues for the U.S. Marine Corps’ CH-53K King Stallion heavy-lift helicopter.

“Bringing together the tiger team exemplifies the importance and purpose of an integrated test team,” Col. Jack Perrin, PMA-261 program manager at heavy lift helicopter program office, said in a statement published Tuesday. “This was a priority for NAVAIR, industry and the Marine Corps, and the team hit it out of the park.”

CH-53K King Stallion is manufactured by Sikorsky and designed to broaden the service’s capability to rapidly transport materials. The platform is equipped with General Electric-built T-408 engines.

Members of the joint team conducted root cause analyses and came up with design models to address the causes of EGR. The team used the resulting model to build components for one of the test aircraft that was used to collect flight test data.

The Department of Commerce is working on a set of five rules aimed at restricting exports of quantum computing, 3-D printing systems and other sensitive technologies to China and other potential adversaries, Reuters reported Tuesday.

“Based on their titles, the rules appear to be narrowly tailored to address specific national security issues, which should go a long way to calming the nerves of those in industry concerned that the administration would impose controls over broad categories of widely available technologies,” said Kevin Wolf, former assistant secretary of commerce for export administration.   

A source said the department is expected to ask for industry feedback on the rules before sending them to international agencies for approval and plans to add another rule that will cover artificial intelligence.

Other rules would regulate exports of Gate-All-Around Field Effect transistor technology, single-use chambers for chemical reactions and chemicals used to make Novichok, a Russian nerve agent.

A RAND Corp. report says the Department of Defense has yet to provide the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center with sufficient resources, authorities and visibility to allow AI to make its impact across DoD.

RAND said Tuesday the Pentagon’s AI strategy lacks metrics and baselines to evaluate progress and faces several challenges, including the lack of data and clear measures to further develop the AI skills of employees.

“The success of Deep Learning is currently predicated on the availability of large, labeled data sets. Pursuing AI on a department-wide scale will require DoD to fundamentally transform its culture into a data-enabled one,” said Danielle Tarraf, the report’s lead author and a senior information scientist at RAND.

The study presents 11 tactical and strategic recommendations to advance AI adoption, including the need for JAIC to come up with a five-year strategic roadmap to implement the mission of scaling AI and for DoD to advance the practice of testing and verification of AI platforms in collaboration with academia and industry.

The report assesses how DoD works to build, test and sustain AI-related technologies and frames its evaluation based on three categories of the department’s AI applications: enterprise AI, operational AI and mission-support AI apps.