The White House has unveiled new measures that seek to help veterans, uniformed personnel and their families leverage the use of federal education benefits through a presidential memorandum.

The memorandum calls for the Education Department to work with the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security to develop, launch and evaluate a pilot program that seeks to provide counseling support as well as inform soldiers on educational and training programs, the White House said Friday.

Federal agencies will also work to advance data sharing efforts in order to increase transparency and facilitate access to career outcomes, student default rates and education attainment of veterans and servicemembers.

Other measures include the use of online tools, promotion of military apprenticeship programs, amendment of the Post-9/11 GI bill, and development of standards to safeguard veterans from fraudulent marketing of educational benefits.

The White House document also includes the creation of an interagency working group composed of representatives from DoD, VA and other federal agencies that will work to coordinate the development and enforcement of policies on education benefits programs.

The U.S. Air Force and the state of Ohio plan to deploy research equipment worth $5 million at Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport in a bid to secure Federal Aviation Administration approval for unmanned aircraft use beyond a pilot’s line of sight, Springfield News-Sun reported Thursday.

Allison Wichie writes Art Huber, director of operations at the Air Force Research Laboratory, said that AFRL will collaborate with the Wright State Research Institute to install new technology at the airport before year-end.

The initiative seeks to foster the use of drone technology on national security and defense missions in addition to commercial applications such as delivery of goods, according to the report.

David Gross, the Wright State Research Institute’s chief engineer, said the new technology will be utilized alongside FAA’s air traffic control network, radar and instruments that support the airport’s ground-based sense-and-avoid system.

Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Oklahoma) is one of the potential candidates for the NASA administrator position and secretary of the U.S. Air Force under the administration of President-elect Donald Trump, Space News reported Friday.

Jeff Foust writes Bridenstine is a former U.S. Navy pilot who introduced in April the American Space Renaissance Act, a bill that seeks to implement a “holistic” approach to space policy and covers commercial space, civil and national security issues.

Bridenstine, who also serves in the Oklahoma Air National Guard, has also supported the “enhanced payload review” concept that is based on the Federal Aviation Administration’s payload assessment process for commercial launch licenses, Foust reports.

During his Nov. 2 speech at a Lunar Exploration Analysis Group meeting in Maryland, he suggested regulatory changes to help commercial space firms launch their own missions and expressed support to moon exploration missions by NASA, according to the report.

The report said former astronaut Eileen Collins is also being considered for the NASA chief post.

Mark Albrecht, former executive secretary of the National Space Council during President George H.W. Bush’s administration, oversees the NASA transition team for the next administration and may also be considered for the administrator post at the space agency, the report added.

NASA will highlight results of various agency research and supercomputing projects at SC16, an international high-performance computing conference scheduled to take place in Salt Lake City, Utah from Nov. 14 to 17.

Professionals from five NASA centers will present 40 mission projects that use the space agency’s HPC resources such as complex aerodynamic simulations of helicopter rotor blade-tip vortices, shifting ozone patterns simulations and modeling and simulation systems, NASA said Thursday.

The agency also plans to exhibit three-dimensional models and visualizations during the event to provide insights into the sun’s magnetic field cycle and other solar incidents.

“NASA supercomputers are critical to helping scientists around the world gain new knowledge and understanding of our complex world and the universe,” said Piyush Mehrotra, chief of the advanced supercomputing division at the Ames Research Center in California.

NASA also updated its Pleiades supercomputer to increase the system’s power to 246,048 cores and performance to 7.25 petaflops in efforts to address modeling and simulation requirements of the agency’s aeronautics, exploration and science programs.