The Department of Homeland Security has revived a program to identify airliners’ risks to cyber attacks, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. DHS teamed up with the departments of Transportation and Defense on the reconstituted cybersecurity program, which will involve limited aircraft testing.

The U.S. Air Force plans to conduct its own initiative to look at the cybersecurity posture of commercial aviation systems. The service runs more than 5,300 aircraft, including converted commercial planes, and has mobilized internal teams to identify cyber vulnerabilities in its systems.

Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics and a 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said he wants the military branch to take an urgent approach to finding potential weaknesses in aircraft. “If we don’t probe first, our adversaries will,” Roper said in an interview. “We’ve been a little complacent in not trying to attack all of the parts of the airplane.”

The U.S. Air Force is looking for technology development concepts to support its 2030 science and technology strategy. The service branch said Thursday that it will select participants from the government, industry and academic sectors who will receive awards worth up to $2 million as part of the Air Force Explore initiative.

According to the service, teams must address S&T priorities encompassing information sharing, persistent awareness and other areas for achieving combat dominance. Challenges may involve imagery-based vehicle tracking, personnel recovery equipment delivery and in-flight refueling and re-arming operations.

“Our goal is to establish partnerships that develop capability ideas and mature them into opportunity spaces for the Air Force,” said Reid Melville, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s lead for Air Force Explore program.

Interested parties may submit applications through Nov. 11 ahead of the service’s plans to release funding invitations by March 2020.

The Senate Appropriations Committee recommends the Federal Aviation Administration to augment the agency’s method to streamline commercial launch policy, Space News reported Thursday. The committee approved a bill that boosts FAA’s funds for commercial launch licensing, but also urges the agency to create another draft on associated policy.

The agency’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation would receive $26 million via the bill, in contrast to the House’s $24.9 million proposal. A recent committee-issued report notes several concerns in FAA’s draft policy. 

The existing draft provides unnecessary entry barriers for newer firms, limits cost efficiency and does not address the policy’s effects to future space ports, according to the report. The committee urges FAA to revise launch licensing requirements and provide a supplemental rulemaking proposal notice before the release of a final policy.

The Department of Veterans Affairs unveiled a new scheduling capability in support of the agency’s plans to modernize its appointment system, Nextgov reported Thursday. Jointly built by Lockheed Martin’s Systems Made Simple subsidiary and Epic, the Medical Appointment Scheduling System has been fielded at the Chalmers. P. Wylie Ambulatory Care Center in Ohio until June 2020.

According to the report, the center features an updated framework and a specialized team that can accommodate the scheduling tool. John Windom, executive director of the Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization at VA, said the agency will transition to the Cerner Scheduling System and the Cerner Millenium EHR tool as part of the modernization initiative.

U.S. Special Operations Command is working to develop artificial intelligence technologies to help the military identify personnel who best suit certain tasks, Military.com reported Thursday.

SOCOM officials have collected and studied data on potential members for the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command. The information covers a very wide range and only excludes privacy-protected content, David Spirk, SOCOM’s chief data officer, told Military.com

“In the next six months, we’ll have a minimal viable product that we can begin using to use machine learning to identify who would be a good Marine Raider,” he said. If its successful, SOCOM will implement the approach across the special forces application process, Spirk noted.

Ball Aerospace delivered the Operational Land Imager 2 (OLI-2) for Landsat 9, completing development of the instrument on schedule and under budget, the company announced on Friday. Ball will continue to support instrument integration and spacecraft-level testing, working closely with NASA and the Landsat 9 spacecraft provider.

The Operational Land Imager 2 design is a virtual copy of the instrument’s predecessor, which launched in 2013 on the Landsat 8 spacecraft and is operating past its design life with no interruptions to operations for more than six years. 

OLI-2 is a push-broom sensor with a four-mirror telescope that takes measurements in the visible, near infrared and shortwave infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The instrument images the entire globe every 16 days at resolutions as high as 15 meters, which is sufficient to resolve land cover features such as forests, farms and urban centers.

“Ball Aerospace is enabling the sustainability of the nation’s land imaging architecture through collaboration with our customer and industry partners,” said Makenzie Lystrup, vice president and general manager, Civil Space, Ball Aerospace. “By developing innovative, reliable, cost-effective instruments and investing in the next generation of land imaging technology, we are ensuring the long-term continuity of Landsat’s important data record.”

About Ball Aerospace

Ball Corporation (NYSE:BLL) supplies innovative, sustainable aluminum packaging solutions for beverage, personal care and household products customers, as well as aerospace and other technologies and services primarily for the U.S. government. Ball Corporation and its subsidiaries employ 17,500 people worldwide and reported 2018 net sales of $11.6 billion.