The US Navy has awarded Boeing contracts worth a total of $274.4m to produce five Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs). Based on Boeing’s Echo Voyager prototype UUV, the 15.5m-long submersible could be used for mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, electronic warfare and strike missions. Berenice Baker finds out more.
An asteroid estimated to be around the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza may hit the Earth on May 6, 2022, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Despite the one in 3,800 odds — a measly 0.026% chance — of the asteroid smashing into the Earth, the worst-case scenario will surely be of a scene akin to the climax of an apocalypse movie, or even worse, as per NASA via The Daily Express on Nov. 16.
If the “city-killer” asteroid, labeled JF1, is to hit Earth, the impact would be equivalent to the detonation of 230 kilotons of TNT. That is 15 times stronger than the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima in 1945, which destroyed the whole city with 15 kilotons of force.
The Russian military will be going all out sci-fi, with Vladimir Putin saying the plan for boosting the Armed Forces until 2033 should focus on AI and weapons based on ‘new physical principles.’
With the introduction of a whole range of state-of-the-art arms in recent years, Russia has been “able to make a step forward compared to the world’s other military powers,” Putin said during a meeting of the Russian Security Council on Friday.
The tally of the newest weapons and hardware in the possession of the country’s Armed Forces and Navy is currently over 68 percent, he said, adding that they must be increased to at least 70 percent and maintained at that level.
New materials to deflect massive amounts of surface heat don’t come from nature.
A protective coating of carbon nanotubes may help the Pentagon field warplanes and missiles that can survive the intense heat generated at five times the speed of sound.
Researchers from Florida State University’s High-Performance Materials Institute, with funding from the U.S. Air Force, discovered that soaking sheets of carbon nanotubes in phenol-based resin increases their ability to disperse heat by about one-sixth, allowing a thinner sheet to do the job.
US Defence Secretary Mark Esper on Friday ruled out allegations of unfair competition in the awarding of a US$10-billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft.
“I am confident it was conducted freely and fairly, without any type of outside influence,” Esper told a news conference in Seoul, South Korea.
Formally called the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure, or JEDI, the contract was awarded to Microsoft on 25 October, and the lucrative deal could span 10 years.
Posted in military
The military is developing a shapeshifting wheel that is capable of transforming in just 2 seconds.
WASHINGTON — Military space operators at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, are working with the Department of Commerce to help ease the transfer of space traffic management responsibilities, Maj. Gen. Stephen Whiting said Nov. 15.
“We’re eager for that to happen,” Whiting said at a Mitchell Institute event on Capitol Hill.
Whiting is the commander of the 14th Air Force and the Combined Force Space Component Command under U.S. Space Command. He oversees the two major organizations — the Combined Space Operations Center and the 18th Space Control Squadron — that help to maintain a catalog of space objects and notify satellite operators around the world when other satellites or debris threaten to collide with spacecraft.
There’s reason to think fruits of the collaboration may interest the military. The Pentagon’s cloud strategy lists four tenets for the JEDI contract, among them the improvement of its AI capabilities. This comes amidst its broader push to tap tech-industry AI development, seen as far ahead of the government’s.
Microsoft’s $10 billion Pentagon contract puts the independent artificial-intelligence lab OpenAI in an awkward position.
A combined team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S. and Atomic Weapons Establishment in the U.K. has found that rapidly compressing lead to planetary-core type pressures makes it stronger than steel. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes how they managed to compress the metal so strongly without melting it.
Defining strength in a material is difficult. Strength can refer to a material’s ability withstand bending or breaking under certain conditions. Making things even more complicated is that the strength of any given material can change under varying conditions—such as when heat or compression are applied. In this new effort, the researchers showed just how difficult it can be to nail down how strong a material is—in this case, lead.
Lead is not very strong. Pressing a fingernail against a car’s battery terminal is enough to create indentations, for example. But the researchers with this new effort report that the metal can be strengthened considerably by exerting extreme pressure.
