Army officials said equipping the Extended Range Cannon Artillery system with an autoloader presents a challenge to the service branch, National Defense reported Monday. ERCA supports the Army’s long-range precision fires modernization priority and seeks to expand the Paladin self-propelled howitzers’ range to 70 kilometers.

“Of course when you introduce an autoloader into a preexisting chassis that we have with the [Paladin Integrated Management platform], there are all sorts of technological risks involved with that,” Col. Timothy Fuller, program manager for armored fighting vehicles, said Monday during a panel discussion at the Association of the United States Army’s conference in Washington, D.C. “It also adds an entire new cab to the vehicle,” Fuller added.

Rafferty said the service plans to use feedback from warfighters to support the development of the cannon. Rich Granitzki, long-range precision fires science and technology adviser for Combat Capabilities Development Command, said the Army is using prototypes “to drive down some of the risks” and facilitate the transition to the autoloader.

The Office of Personnel Management is using an in-house app to track federal employee performance and is working to grow the digital tool’s adoption next year, Nextgov reported Friday.

The agency began digitizing its employee performance assessments in 2012, and has now implemented its USA Performance app across 35 federal government agencies, covering about 35,000 employees. M.C. Price, associate chief information officer for infrastructure at OPM, said the task to digitize the process was complex.

“It was very complex to digitize it and to meet all the agency requirements on the different forms,” he said.

Associated officials told NextGov the agency expects to add 41K employees to the system in 2020.

The U.S. Air Force has added new features to a platform that airmen use to receive and share mission readiness data. The Visible, Accessible, Understandable, Linked and Trusted Data or VAULT platform now allows users to control and experiment with data and generate analytics-driven results, USAF said Friday.

The update also includes tools for metadata and storage management, data cleansing and data ingestion. All these new tools are intended to improve data exploitation and better inform decision making.

“With these capabilities now realized on the VAULT Platform we can fully harness the power of data to make timely decisions and achieve mission success,” said Col. Charles Destefani, acting deputy chief data officer and lead data architect at the Air Force Chief Data Office.

The updated VAULT also allows airmen to use custom applications to manipulate information.

The Naval Research Laboratory has deployed a thermospheric imaging tool designed to transmit space weather information from NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer satellite.

Developed by NRL in partnership with St. Cloud State University, the Michelson Interferometer for Global High-Resolution Thermospheric Imaging instrument works to gauge temperature and wind profiles and help scientists observe the effects of solar and terrestrial weather to the ionosphere, the U.S. Navy said Friday.

The ionosphere is located atop the mesosphere and serves as a border between space and the Earth. NASA intends to use the ICON satellite to orbit the ionosphere and assist scientists in understanding its structure through the MIGHTI instrument.

“The ionosphere is where Earth ends or where space begins, and we haven’t studied it nearly enough to fully understand how it works and to make reliable predictions,” said Christoph Englert, lead investigator for MIGHTI.

NRL previously fielded two instruments in 2002 and 2007 to explore atmospheric chemistry 60 miles above the Earth’s surface.

Joseph Klimavicz, chief information officer and deputy assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice, has said that the department is working on various modernization efforts in line with the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract’s objectives. Klimavicz said in an interview with Government Matters aired Sunday that updating DOJ’s internet and telecommunications capabilities would help the department virtualize its security architecture and reduce operational costs.

He added that the EIS contract would enable the department to reinvest in other modernization efforts, including transitioning data and applications to a cloud-based environment and deploying software-based networking.

“We really need more bandwidth, especially at our remote sites, and even at our core facilities to connect them together,” he said. “I think we’ll have more flexibility when it comes to security, new policies. In the end, we’ll be able to get to our cloud service providers and more flexible and build in the resiliency too.”

According to Klimavicz, DOJ has been working to increase the bandwidth capacity in 1,500 locations and optimize its cloud-based applications over the past two years. He added that his office aims to quicken the pace of modernization and close its data centers in less than five years as part of its cloud implementation strategy.

Ken Bowersox, acting associate administrator for NASA’s human exploration and operations division, has said that the agency is working on a “very aggressive” schedule for the Space Launch System, Space News reported Friday. SLS is a super heavy-lift launch vehicle intended to send the uncrewed Orion spacecraft to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis-1 mission.

Bowersox told attendees duiring a presenattion in Las Cruces, N.M. that it’s likely for NASA’s projected 2020 launch to be delayed depending on the results of further integration and static-fire tests.

“We have a chance to actually have a rocket on the pad and launch by the end of next year,” he said. “But when you start throwing all those different uncertainties, it’s more likely that we will move out into 2021.”

In September, NASA finished integrating the launch’ vehicle’s components intended to support its core stage. Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne will work with NASA for further integration activities.

According to Bowersox, an official decision on a new launch date will not be issued until a new associate administrator for human exploration and operations is appointed.