The U.S. Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) Military Engineering Program on Remote Assessment of Infrastructure for Ensured Maneuver (RAFTER) Boreal Aspects of Ensured Maneuver (BAEM) identifies the need for modeling over-snow vehicle performance, as many factors related to vehicle setup and land surface condition contribute to vehicle efficiency. Accurately estimating snow macromechanical characteristics—such as elastic modulus, stiffness, and strength—is critical for understanding how effectively a vehicle will travel over snow-covered terrain.

Increasing the operational efficiency of weapons employed in hostile environments is a high priority of the United States Air Force (USAF). In recent history, the USAF has made a move to smaller and internally stored weapons, especially for fighter aircraft. Maintaining a low radar cross section signature, and thus a low observable air vehicle, is desirable so the aircraft is less detectable by the enemy.

Acoustic waves propagating in the atmosphere may undergo many effects including refraction by temperature and wind velocity gradients, scattering by atmospheric turbulence, absorption by the atmosphere (fluid), diffraction by terrain features, and absorption and reflection by a porous ground. As a result, there may be insonification in acoustic shadow zones, amplitude and phase fluctuations of the propagating sound signals, loss of signal coherence, changes in the interference maxima and minima of the direct ground reflected waves, and multipath effects. Understanding these effects is important for a variety of military applications, such as acoustic source localization and classification, noise propagation in the atmosphere, and the development of new remote sensing techniques of the atmosphere.

BIRD Aerosystems
Herzliya, Israel
www.birdaero.com

BIRD Aerosystems, a company that specializes in developing Airborne Missile Protection Systems (AMPS) and Special Mission Aircraft Solutions (ASIO), officially launched the OSCAR - Ocean Surveillance Control and Reconnaissance solution and demonstrated it for the first time at this year’s Paris Air Show 2019.

The existence of countless proprietary file formats and the exchange of 3D CAD data has been a significant problem since the beginning of 3D CAD modeling. CAD applications and methods using digital data are constantly changing, which predicates the need for a solution to share validated and accurately translated data. Thus the birth of STEP242.

NASA’s X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft will eliminate the cockpit’s forward-facing window, replacing it with the eXternal Visibility System (XVS) that uses a 4K monitor that serves as the central window and allows the pilot to safely see traffic in his or her flight path. The XVS displays stitched images from two cameras outside the aircraft combined with terrain data from an advanced computing system.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Missouri University of Science and Technology, and NASA conducted experiments to understand the behavior of a high-performance electric propellant compared with a traditional propellant.

An Air Force Research Laboratory-developed product called HydroSkip repels water from aircraft transparencies, addressing the issue of limited visibility caused by heavy rain that can impair the pilot’s ability to navigate the plane and land safely.

Sandia National Laboratories researchers, as part of a group of National Nuclear Security Administration scientists, have wrapped up years of field experiments to improve the United States’ ability to differentiate earthquakes from underground explosions, key knowledge needed to advance the nation’s monitoring and verification capabilities for detecting underground nuclear explosions.

The Army is advancing its ground-based precision navigation and timing (PNT) technology to counter spoofing threats and improve operations in a multi-domain environment.