A U.S. Air Force-led team concluded tests on a drone refueling system designed to work with F-35 aircraft systems. The F-35 Lightning II program team launched an F-35B aircraft to the Edwards Air Force Base along with the KC-135 Stratotanker system to highlight the tanker’s capability to refuel at night operations, USAF said Friday.

The KC-135 works to attach to an aircraft’s lighting assembly through the use of a refueling probe. The ground team used amber and warm white lighting under varying brightness levels and determined that the latter tone will work for the tanker’s operators and the pilots.

“An issue with the current probe light was that it was too bright, blinding the KC-135 aerial refueling boom operators,” said Michael McGee, 418th Flight Test Squadron aerial refueling project manager at Edwards AFB. “The new light was designed to be less bright, but still bright enough for the F-35 pilot to see clearly.”

The Air Refueling Certification Agency will evaluate the tanker’s design and integrate the results into an updated flight clearance for the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy.

Ron Ross, a computer scientist and a National Institute of Standards and Technology fellow, told Fifth Domain in an interview published on Friday that the potential role of artificial intelligence in improving cybersecurity depends on the development of a trusted platform. 

“Any AI program that you’re running at the application level is totally going to be bogus information,” he said. “Now, if you can build a trusted platform and take advantage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, you’ve got a great brave new world there. That’s awesome and we should be doing all of that.”

Ross also offered updates on NIST’s revised standards meant to require contractors to protect government data and cited the need for companies to ensure information security. 

“Information that’s critical doesn’t lose value because it goes from the federal government to a prime contractor and that value stays just as high when it goes to the sub. I think the ultimate solution is you have to protect the information no matter where it is, and somebody is going to have to pay for that,” Ross added.

The Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy is working to implement emerging technology to streamline acquisition procedures, FedScoop reported Friday.

Joanie Newhart, associate administrator of acquisition workforce programs at the OFPP, said the office is collaborating with the Chief Acquisition Officer Council to deploy new technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence to handle the workload and repetitive functions during the recent 2019 FedScoop IT Modernization Summit.

“We think it’s going to explode this year, so we want to get in front of it and use it wisely,” she noted.

Agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services are leading the efforts to utilize technologies like AI and blockchain to automate contracting processes, according to Newhart. She added that OFPP will partner with Congress to develop strategies for using emerging technology to accelerate procurement procedures as part of the former’s Acquisition Modernization Plan.

The Trump Administration released a new national strategy to guide the federal government in protecting the country’s critical infrastructures and security for future space weather events, such as solar storms and flares. White House unveiled the National Space Weather Strategy and Action Plan on Friday that aims to help the country prepare, predict and manage with space weather hazards.

The document provides a collaborative and coordinated roadmap in increasing resilience of homeland and national security critical assets and systems and to find methods to forecast and characterize space weather events. The White House also plans to create response and recovery plans to help reduce the impact of extreme weather events in space.

Sweden saw the latest space weather events in 2003 and 2015 that caused electric power blackouts, rerouting of commercial flights and closure of Swedish airspace for more than an hour. In late March, President Trump signed an executive order on coordinating national resilience to electromagnetic pulses to avoid such damage to the U.S. in the future.

NASA concluded initial flight testing of a rotary aircraft designed to fly above the red planet’s surface. The four-pound Mars Helicopter underwent temperature testing and other trials to obtain certification to operate on the red planet, the agency said Thursday.

MiMi Aung, project manager for the Mars Helicopter at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led a team testing the helicopter in a 7.62-meter-wide space simulator. The team replaced all other gases from the cylindrical simulator with carbon dioxide to mimic the atmosphere on Mars.

“Gearing up for that first flight on Mars, we have logged over 75 minutes of flying time with an engineering model, which was a close approximation of our helicopter,” Aung said.

The helicopter will undergo more tests of up to 90 seconds each after a few months. NASA plans to deploy the helicopter on the red planet in February 2021 as part of the Mars 2020 mission.