After piggybacking on the Atlas V rocket for 300,000 miles across space, NASA’s Insight lander has successfully descended onto Mars’ surface, Peraton said Monday. Insight settled onto the plains of Mars’ Elysium Planitia at 12 p.m. PST on Nov 26th.

Following months of rigorous preparation, the 75-person team at Peraton worked closely with NASA’s Deep Space Network to send the probe into Mars’ atmosphere. It took seven minutes for InSight to penetrate through the atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour. Despite the risk of failure, InSight landed on the surface with minimal help from mission control.

During the landing sequence, a complex communications relay delivered data to MarCO A and MarCO B, the first-ever cube satellites to launch into deep space. ExecutiveGov reported Tuesday that the twin CubeSats will continue to transmit data back to mission control for at least two weeks.

Now that InSight has landed on Mars, the probe will drill into the planet’s interior for 728 days to collect data and study seismic activity below the surface. In addition to gathering data, InSight aims to uncover potential evidence of previous Martian life and explore the possibility of humans habitation. According to Peraton, Mars could be the second most habitable planet for humans.

“This mission is particularly exciting. Not only do we have the privilege of working with JPL [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory], the only organization with the distinction of successfully landing on Mars, we enable the technology that propels dynamic scientific advancements,”  commented Sonny Giroux, Peraton’s program manager.

Previously, GovConWire reported on Nov. 16th that Peraton extended its contract under a one-year $243M award, to continue providing telemetry, tracking and command services for NASA’s Space Communications Network Services.

The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security released a report assessing the Federal Emergency Management Agency‘s oversight of an alert and warning system used to inform the public of natural disasters or emergency situations.

The DHS said on Nov. 19 that FEMA maintains limited control over the sending and canceling of state alerts via the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, and does not adequately mandate functions that an emergency alert software vendor must have for its product, such as preview or cancel options. It’s also not mandatory for software vendors to train federal and state authorities on how to operate their technology, the agency noted.

FEMA’s IPAWS Program Management Office assists over 1,000 officials on how to use the national alerting tool, but the agency cannot evaluate each message to validate its accuracy, according to the DHS. FEMA responded positively to the DHS’ observations and agreed that changes should be implemented to boost the alerting system’s performance. Those changes should be put in place by Oct. 31, 2019, the DHS added.

NASA has announced its two Mars Cube One satellites have transmitted information from the InSight spacecraft to the agency’s Deep Space Network in real time, SpaceNews.com reported.

The MarCO cube satellites, launched in May as secondary payloads, were designed to relay telemetry from InSight to monitor the spacecraft’s landing. The CubeSats received UHF data from InSight during its entry, descent and landing on Mars before transferring the information through X-band frequencies to NASA’s worldwide spacecraft communications network.

The MarCO mission is slated to run for two more weeks, and will see the spacecraft transmit more data that may include images of Mars and the health of the two satellites.

Andy Klesh, chief engineer of the MarCO effort, said that NASA officials are discussing plans for an extended mission for the twin CubeSats.

Top U.S. Army officials clarified that the service’s ongoing integrated tactical network modernization will not seek a new network but will look at commercially-available technologies to expand connectivity for units battalion and below, C4ISRnet reported Monday. 

“We’re not replacing anything,” said Lt. Col. Brandon Baer, Army’s ITN product manager. “What we’re doing is we’re basically taking program of record and we’re looking at injecting commercial off-the-shelf items to see where we can enhance or improve our capabilities.” 

The Army hopes technologies such as radios, tablets and satellite communications provide a shared understanding throughout a unit. One technology the service considers is an Android device strapped to soldiers’ chests that would allow them to access a shared photo or map for situational awareness in the field. Baer and other Army officials expect to continue experiments to develop new concepts and systems for the ITN. 

“It gives us an opportunity to keep up with industry and tweak things as we go, with user feedback and also inject capabilities depending on what the unit has [and] what the unit’s missions are,” Baer said.

Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, director of the U.S. Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs, said that a program office has been established to help the service develop hypersonic strike capabilities, USNI News reported.

Earlier this month, Wolfe spoke at the 2018 Naval Submarine League symposium. He told attendees he has set up a program office within the SSP to develop hypersonic weapons, which will eventually be part of the U.S. military’s conventional global strike arsenal. Through the conventional prompt global strike effort, the U.S. military seeks to hit any target anywhere in the world within sixty minutes. Wolfe noted that he created the hypersonics program office at the behest of Pentagon and Navy acquisition officials.

“We have a program, we are funded, and we’re moving forward with that capability,” Wolfe said.

The effort at the SSP lines up with the recent pronouncements made by Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who gave assurances that the U.S. military will pursue hypersonic weapons, especially in light of Russia and China’s reported success with the technology. The U.S. armed forces will also be using hypersonic weapons “sooner and more often than people have ever expected,” Shanahan said.

The Office of Management and Budget has updated the Data Center Optimization Initiative after Congress passed a measure that extends agencies’ compliance with the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act’s data center consolidation requirements through Oct. 1, 2020.

Suzette Kent, federal chief information officer, said in a draft memorandum published Monday OMB decided to revise DCOI in accordance with the FITARA Enhancement Act of 2017.

The memo seeks to align the updated DCOI with the Cloud Smart strategy and update the optimization metrics and classification of data centers.

OMB proposed to revise the metrics for virtualization, advanced energy metering, server utilization and add a new metric to monitor the data center’s availability.

The agency also decided to remove the metrics for facility utilization and energy efficiency in the updated DCOI guidance.

The new DCOI also includes updates to performance metrics.

“Moving forward, to more accurately measure the performance of data centers, OMB will avoid using averages for metrics whenever possible or setting arbitrary goals, and will instead identify metrics where agencies can demonstrate continuous improvement beyond the performance period of this memorandum,” according to the memo.

Comments on the draft memo are due Dec. 26.
 

The Defense Department has announced plans to move up to 80 percent of its applications to the proposed Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud platform, Federal News Network reported Monday.

DoD’s cloud migration goal was revealed after the Government Accountability Office issued its ruling on a protest filed by Oracle over the solicitation for the potential $10B JEDI cloud procurement contract.

“The JEDI Cloud is a critical first step toward an enterprise cloud solution that enables data-driven decision making and allows DoD to take full advantage of applications and data resources,” Heather Babb, a spokeswoman for DoD, said in a statement to the publication.

“The scale of the missions at DoD will require the DoD to have multiple clouds from multiple vendors,” Babb added.

The Pentagon issued in July its request for proposals for the single-award JEDI contract.