The Government Accountability Office recommends that federal agencies continue to adopt the cloud to reduce the cost of modernizing information technology platforms and services. GAO said Monday that 16 agencies have seen progress implementing cloud computing services and have continued to increase spending since 2015. 

Officials cited that cloud enhanced customer service, the availability of weather-related information and collaboration and information sharing among federal, state and local agencies. Moving to the cloud also helped 13 federal agencies save $291 million from their modernization efforts. 

However, majority of the agencies are facing challenges in tracking cloud-related investments and savings. Officials reported problems assessing IT investments and the lack of proper guidance from the Office of Management and Budget to report savings from cloud implementations.

“As a result of these identified issues, it is likely that agency-reported cloud spending and savings figures were underreported,” GAO said. 

The watchdog recommends that the involved agencies and OMB improve how they track and report savings and cost avoidance from the migration and deployment of cloud services.

The agencies in the GAO report are the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor, State, Treasury, Transportation and Veterans Affairs, the General Services Administration, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration.

NASA is facilitating observations of a binary asteroid and its small moonlet to serve as the target for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test intended to demonstrate kinetic impact for planetary defense, NASA said Monday.

The agency is studying the behavior of the asteroid Didymos A and its moonlet Didymos B using telescopes at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., as well as other locations around the world. Researchers integrated a DRACO imaging system and a cube satellite from the Italian Space Agency to observe the asteroid’s movements more effectively.

“The Didymos system is too small and too far to be seen as anything more than a point of light, but we can get the data we need by measuring the brightness of that point of light, which changes as Didymos A rotates and Didymos B orbits,” noted Andy Rivkin, DART investigation team co-lead for APL. 

NASA expects the DART spacecraft to intercept the smaller asteroid’s orbit and crash into the moonlet in September 2022. The agency last month selected SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle to propel the spacecraft from Vanderberg Air Force Base in California in June 2021. 

Vice President Mike Pence told attendees at the Satellite 2019 conference in Washington, D.C. that the proposed space force will “soon be a reality,” National Defense magazine reported Monday.

Pence, also the chairman of the National Space Council, noted that the Trump administration is working with Congress to stand up the sixth military branch. He warned that adversaries like China, North Korea and Russia have been “aggressively deploying” space technologies such as GPS signal-jamming capabilities, ground-based electronic attacks and other satellite communications technology.

“We recognize that space is a warfighting domain just like the land, air and sea and America is going to be as dominant for our security in space as we are here on Earth,” he added.

In addition, Pence noted that the administration is working on space situational awareness efforts to foster data sharing among industry players. The administration also seeks to promote private sector initiatives to develop guidelines and standards for activities such as space launches and traffic management.

The National Nuclear Security Administration issued three strategic documents providing information on how the agency and its partners can form an integrated approach to modernize the U.S. nuclear security enterprise to address emerging threats.

“We are at our highest level of activity since the Cold War, and these three documents will ensure that our enterprise of some 44,000 employees has a common vision and an integrated approach to strengthening the nation’s nuclear security,” Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, under secretary for nuclear security and NNSA administrator, said in a statement Monday. 

NNSA’s Strategic Vision aims to ensure the agency remains responsive to nuclear security and strategic defense needs of the country. Through the Governance and Management Framework, the agency will promote its One NNSA team approach to increase mission integration and strategic planning between federal headquarters, field office staff and partners at NNSA laboratories, plants and sites.  

The last document, the Strategic Integrated Road Map, highlights the agency’s current and future mission priorities to modernize and secure the nuclear security enterprise. The efforts include maintaining the stockpile, countering threats, keeping the nuclear Navy moving, utilizing new scientific and technological discoveries and modernizing infrastructures.