The Air Force Research Laboratory has developed a robotic machine to autonomously design, conduct and evaluate experimental data to aid materials research processes.

The U.S. Air Force said Saturday the Autonomous Research System brings together robotics, artificial intelligence and data science in efforts to complete up to 100 experiments per day.

Benji Maruyama, a senior materials research engineer at AFRL’s functional materials division, said ARES will not replace human researchers but aims to foster human-machine partnerships.

Maruyama’s team ran more than 600 experiments through ARES to determine conditions that could help achieve maximum growth rate for carbon nanotubes — materials that conduct heat and electricity, the Air Force said.

Scientists set the objective growth rate that ARES used to perform research.

Maruyama noted ARES is built to take over bench-level experiment processes such as instrument preparation, monitoring and cleaning to give researchers more time for “creative” thinking that can lead to discoveries.

Kevin Decker, a software engineer from science and technology company UES, collaborates with the ARES team in efforts to integrate generic research functions into ARES.

AFRL plans to use ARES for autonomous chemical and physical research in the future, the Air Force noted.

NASA has awarded $30,000 in prize money to each of the five teams that won in the third ground tournament round of a $5 million competition that seeks to promote the development of small satellites for future space exploration missions.

The space agency said Tuesday the winning teams in the Cube Quest Challenge’s ground tournament-3 include Team Miles from Fluid & Reason, Cislunar Explorers from Cornell University, CU-E3 from University of Colorado, KitCube from MIT and EDS Triteia from the University of California, San Diego.

The competition consists of four ground tournaments, a lunar derby and a deep space derby and offers an opportunity for the final three teams to launch their Cubesats onboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft as part of the Exploration Mission-1, which is scheduled to launch in 2018.

NASA will select the three winning teams for the EM-1 flight during the challenge’s final ground tournament to be held in February and will subject the three teams to a safety review prior to the first unmanned lunar flyby mission.

The Cube Quest Challenge is part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program.

The U.S. Cyber Command‘s 133 cyber force teams have reached initial operating capability status that authorizes each team to execute their respective fundamental missions.

Cybercom said Monday the groups align with the three primary missions of the Defense Department‘s Cyber Strategy to defend DoD networks and secure data, support joint military commander objectives and as protect the U.S. infrastructure.

The Cyber Mission Force currently includes 5,000 individuals across 133 teams and Cybercom aims to increase the number of members to 6,200.

Each team member will operate at a full mission capacity to plan, direct and synchronize cyberspace operations for cyber deterrence against adversaries, the command added.

Navy Adm. Michael Rogers, Cybercom commander, said the U.S. military services’ recognition of cyber as a mission set that needs dedicated expertise helped the DoD train and build the Cyber Mission Force.

The White House’s Office of Science and Technology has introduced a new initiative intended to support the use of small satellites in the government and private sectors for many types of mission requirements.

The White House said Friday OSTP intends for the Harnessing the Small Satellite Revolution initiative to collaborate with NASA, Defense Department, Commerce Department and other federal agencies to identify additional steps to develop smallsat technologies.

The goal is to apply small satellites to remote sensing, communications, science and space exploration projects.

NASA will invest up to $25 million to purchase data from non-governmental small spacecraft constellations and $5 million to mature small spacecraft constellation technologies.

The space agency also plans to open a Small Spacecraft Virtual Institute at Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley in 2017 to provide technical knowledge in small spacecraft technology fields.

For its part, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded a $20 million contract to startup firm Planet to develop a constellation of imagery smallsats in low earth orbit in an effort to acquire imagery of at least 85 percent of the Earth’s landmass.

The Commerce Department has also mandated the director of the Office of Space Commerce to serve as ombudsman for the commercial space industry within the federal government.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has also released satellite data sets to help analyze overhead imagery as part of the Multi-View Stereo 3D Mapping Challenge under the initiative.